ghostinafog

in the end i break my teeth on the cyanide almond. the capacity for evil is trivial and irreducible. it is a rock in the bloodstream, it tumbles in the purifier and never gets out. no you can't wash this out. you can scrub & scratch yourself              into a corner through little transgressions. they say loitering on the edge heightens one's senses to things like pastel bricks of scarfwork     & liquor store workers who remember your name. they say hanging up on scam calls will             cost you an earthquake. is this an earthquake? what little love there is slinks gently like a beanstalk               wilting on the steel fen

i remember you bribing gods you did not believe in           just to stay safe. dropping someone off     on the other side of town, you'd say "here is a good deed, let's hope this counts." i thought what kind of a heart is this,              racking up points before Christ. - now you say there is no entertainment other than warfare. lives stretch for so long               half the country stops drinking for new year's, instead staring into the frosty sky,     waiting for another missile or plane crash. the diseases you get stick along for the whole ride, siphoning life out. your lungs wilt and stick          like cobweb to a burnt

at the next party i will introduce myself as a pool     where the moon scatters your reflections into buzzing stripes   framing a city square where you somehow have to pick a direction. all the people that i sift through, like grainy coal i'm too tired to plow,                     sit at the curbs where gravestones should be. maybe i am a student in lurking Leviathans, the unfolding of new bottoms when you think rock bottom had been reached, hence the meaningless hurt that echoes in the water. no one wants to be known because there is nothing after that can be seen from here, hence the overwhelming victory of death. Charon offers a ride t

go to the loneliest place,      fumble in its silken innards for keys, rabbits or fizzing candy when our only obligation     is to never give up on listening. after hell's frozen over,      you wake up to fern frost's apologetic drawings: "took a while to find the words."

you had blood all over your elbows you did not believe anyone could cry for you i could not talk to you for days i hid in attics like a sparrow i hid under beds like a mouse my friends and i spied on our neighbours and stole watermelons from a stranger's house none of us knew how to love we were given assignments with no instructions i did not know how to scream or to move or to kiss your hands if they said they brought you back alive   so i crouched behind a bedframe when the door of unknown opened                       i turned away. after that day, you never believed me. in my own time, i did my required readings,     learned to un

weigh these words            on your way to soccer practice: "tell that when you kid falls prey to probability." you don't feel it, penciling leaf shapes in your              air-conditioned Range Rover. he'll be elbow-deep in bloody sluice, skinning salmon,                       snap. tell that when it's your child in its jaws. we are hard-wired to survive,             not to seek out any truth. they say it takes Titanic to crack an iceberg so this is where your world ends; a whimpering missile fizzling out in the snowfields of another's eyes. 40 years of retinal char,                yet burnt pan drippings collected on your tongue

tonight a red pain buzzes across your chest, ribs clamping the sky's curtains, forcing space inside itself.            but you will yourself back onto cold hard bedrock, letting eyeballs dry out, adjusting to the dark-purple, searching the recesses of corners     where not even spiders scurry to sweep the floor. sewage water hits the back of your throat; this is not fear of death                   but of being uncovered, unpeeled like a garlic lightbulb, sinusy pink insides with rotten eggs brewing exposed;     the million eyes of unnameable                              bulge out in uncomfortable contact. you awaken not to re

  sir you can't sleep here                you can't sleep anywhere the home you saw on TV was someone else's mountains, you will have to carve your own.           yes, and lead them there.             yes, and point out the direction of sunrise yes, and teach them to dismantle a fake. and i know your stomach coils like an eel         from the thought of the work.                              it is not fair, cogs riling the rotgut empty          already, and now this underskin snake. but last time we all fell asleep on different benches,    hugging our branches like cats on life's tree, we woke up in hell; there is no other way,

That was in tougher times,            against impossible blue. grandmother sold mittens and icy dumplings,       cops would not shoo her, still young in a black mink coat; crows gathered around her to peck on sunflower spit. i almost drowned in the crisp snow     running up to her to ask for a rooster lollipop in the only hue of orange                still worth pursuing. It was that colour          that dragged me through sore-throat nights; dark would swoop down on the community parking lot as if it heard me uttering a singsong chirp,                  hundreds of candles flickering on in the eyes of windowed monsters  waiting f

it's all over the newsfeeds now: the dust bowl opens up in a former gravel pit, swallowing the trees' burnt-up broomsticks, an electromagnetic storm lashes out at its tail in our whirlpool         laundromat brains whose storage rooms fill up with dried dragonflies still   wriggling their feet. the insomniacs of us fight bodies              kicking themselves back up, shove snakes writhing in a hose-dance          into a barrel of ECT sleep. wind howls all throughout, a woman crying for help, perhaps, trapped at the bottom-right         corner of a community pool, but who knows when night shushes us black and slippery, a squeeze

the day becomes an hour becomes a pomegranate moon, dangling on before and after little oceans, the imperfect domain of memory; vivid colored birds singing Sunday roars of time (and a time after) and the future rises hushed over the edges of a mountain- it was there before we knew it

Reacquaint me: your mother died last year; my boyfriend has left. You wring your hands beneath the table, where you think I cannot see. I refuse to care; instead I line up lovers between bites of toast. You've taken to staying out late, I've taken to sleeping early. We exchange carefully chosen words-- the ones clipped of meaning. Reacquaint me: here we are, breathing the same city air, both of us trying to seize our own brands of happiness. Yet what is that but a passing shadow of sun? In the darkening afternoon it illuminates us at our prime. We can no more claim it than we can trap the loves of our lives to our side. Reacq