TIMBER 8.1

“You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.” —Ken Burns 1. The Rustling I’m convinced that what I heard that morning was sighing trees, a chorus of sighing trees. They weren’t very loud, not unlike a whisper...

ECHO When they look inside your chest, the sonogram calls your heart an orchid, each petal pulpy and abnormally palpitating. You and I both imagined it would behave this way, flowering too big where it shouldn’t. We have both pressed our ears to conch shells and clocked your heart as...

4 Beasts (excerpted from 50 Beasts to Break Your Heart ) Wrip-Wender The Wrip-Wender is a two-headed snake, each side wet-toothed with fatal venom. When the Wrip-Wender reaches mating age, one head will fall in love with the other. It will spend a fortnight writhing against the earth as one...

Breast Lump in the Night Sky and I Breast lump in the night sky and I can hardly feel the moon anymore. Cancer is that soft-rot balloon that zeppelins by breath and by blood pass under deep acres purple in sleep. We amble blindly there as horses cold and chasing...

Joined one to another. I’m all-in. So I notice They do not pass unnoticed. I get it. Reader, I’m aware. Negation’s the key. Worked backward prevaricate Joining a separate portion (portion me out) joined joint one to another. Make unseparate. * This is what I’m working with— this & truth...

THE ADJACENT ROOM Felt blasé about it, but I’d made a promise. Though more of a commitment, as the word promise hadn’t been said. Without thinking it through, sure, yes, let’s do it had slipped out. And the decision was made. A simple plan to shoot a gun. Practice, familiarize,...

In The Train, Somewhere Near Gwalior Summer, and here the mind and body are enclosed by a dim winter. It isn’t as cold as I am given to feel. Even the sounds of noon are excluded. What you hear is something you never wanted. Talk of loud profit and loss,...

Scene a lynx, a caw, a snowman, a snowshoe hare, bloody, like a rainbow popsicle, the lynx, admiring itself, accurate as a figurine To be damned I damned a gnat for eternity, inside a book of poems. Imagine a brain under a hydraulic press, or squeezing a chickpea. Imagine a...

Saltwater Electric There are so many ways to consume a body, why choose? Storm-swallow it, snap it, let it sink and fill in the salted dark. Glean the parts that show immortal growth. Pickle the body and place it on the mute tongue swollen with prayer. A body whole is...