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After zooming out
After zooming out this afternoon that held focused possibilities like a hand reaching into the backlit arteries of a bokeh I filtered my reflections through your shutter and tore off Fuji film rolls from your skin still considering supposed leaps of faith, oh that stupid obsession of yours, the way Wong Kar-wai …
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A Memento of Nintendo
When one thinks of a ‘game,’ hears its notes playing and effects sounding, Like a pot smashing or a brick bashing, When one smells a game, The cellophane of a case, or the rubber of an analog stick, When one touches it, feeling that red cap, that blazing helmet, that fluffy puff of pink, So…
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Freshman year she called, crying
Freshman year she called, crying We’ll never know what it was or how it came to be. She never showed the signs on her stomach and the signs she wore long on her face were those of the boy hands always drawing on her. Move miles away, we told her, across the rivers and mountains,…
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A Horse Walks Into a Bar
A horse walks into a bar. The Bartender says, “Why the long face?” “Well,” the horse says, “it’s my life.” “What about your life,” the bartender says, “What’s the story?” “That’s just it,” says the horse, “I don’t have a story. I’m a horse, And I’m like all the other horses, and all the…
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listen for green anemoia
twenty minutes from the center of the city once rice fields that my grandmother admired each morning whispering to dragonflies in the cup of her palm squint at night and see cold stars tearing away the horizon motorcycles and black clouds. in our kitchen, my mother cuts her finger unwrapping three layers of stiff…
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Bienvenidos (go home)
The pilot gave all of the instructions twice, once in English and once in Spanish. I had never heard “amarre el cinturón de seguridad” from that crackling airplane speaker. It was so much like just flying to a different state, but it was something new once I looked down at the bright blue ocean.…
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Anabasis
Today, the forecast in Avernus: heavy fog; flash flood warnings; rising tides from the River Cocytus and Acheron. “New at 11, we’ll see that despite our individual attempts at self-control, lamenting and sorrow will continue spilling into the future,” the weatherman drones, and haunted, I think of those ghosts with clipped wings clicking their…
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Lullaby Loon
If you find yourself forgetting how to breathe, do not be afraid. Leave the stones in your throat and learn to rise with the croaking loons, drifting as they do and as they have since the beginning of time. Or since the beginning of this lake. When the land parted and stones dropped down the…
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Morning Prayer
Morning Prayer Little red psalm books that we gathered from a rack like basketballs: sometimes I would get three or four, for my friends, a utopian gesture of plenty that was received passively, the cheap worn covers sliding across the plastic tables. I hated the mornings when we read a long psalm, legs stiffening with…
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Occupation of a Life
He put his hands in the pocket of his brown leather jacket, looking for a piece of paper. All he found was a small receipt he had got from the stationary store in exchange for a red pen, and he wrote: A sailor on land Climbed to the mountaintop and all he saw was the…
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Lemonade // Drain
“Neither you nor your soul is waiting for me at the end of this,” — Nick Flynn, “Cathedral of Salt” All I ever wanted was a kitchen and you standing in the tile-white light. Me, on the floor, drinking pink lemonade & watching the minutes blink 30 In all my years I’ve…
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Lac de Sainte-Croix
Spontaneity escapes me, I swim in fear of unlikely tsunamis, or phantasmic beasts. I swim with a raincoat on, protecting my words from the world. My ears tinged with the muffled sounds of laughter. My body quaking under the temple of thoughts I’ve built. I find myself in a canyon of…