backwards

Backwards, he kept saying, backwards. I thought of the red-headed Australian journalist who'd used that word, and about her Italian husband and the murder in the mountains and her newly published novel cover; how they'd changed the title. You just have no say in a thing like that, she'd said, it's all backwards there. And here I am writing with a new pen. Here I am in my new handwriting, my old rooms. I'd been down in their basement, stacking t-shirts. I'd been down at the river treading water and I looked up to see the city of Richmond lurking over us. This was all Bob's idea, of course. He didn't trust the water there. I was driving back to Boston and off the highway I saw a trailer tractor on fire like a raw animal. The tree tops singed and curled under in flames. The highway was silent. The fire hoses hissed and saved no one. It all passed by clear as a photograph, real as it could manage to be. Believable. We had to crawl along on our bellies all the way to Philadelphia. When we got there it was full of christmas lights. It looked like a dream. Only later could we tell they were factories. And a man I know says "engine" like he's saying "injun". All I hear is injun, injun. Nobody saw her coming. The cats were panting hot. It drives a U-haul around town, pays for red feathers. I'm not good at these things, said Bob. I really did. And Bob, I said, we can stay in our rooms, Bob. We can read all these books. Oh, but the spine tires and the feet itch whether or not the brain moves. This is how it feels underwater; It feels like a tunnel. It looks like its green.

it takes along time sittng

Henry sometimes maybe lied or so I began to think. He sat in his corner and smoked, his eyes darting. What's the difference between these two hands? There was no difference. Maybe the girl is schizophrenic, I said, and he looked at me as if maybe I were the one. It's a horror movie, he said. I know.

epiphany

my brother came out finnish-asian. i came out finnish-black

from the art of war:stichomancy

my adversary to pursue and crush me; it would be far better to encourage my men to deliver a bold counter-attack, and use the advantage thus gained to free myself from the enemy's toils." See the story of Ts`ao Ts`ao, VII. ss. 35, note.]

10. Reduce the hostile chiefs by inflicting damage on them;

[Chia Lin enumerates several ways of inflicting this injury, some of which would only occur to the Oriental mind:--"Entice away the enemy's best and wisest men, so that he may be left without counselors. Introduce traitors into his country, that the government policy may be rendered futile. Foment intrigue and deceit, and thus sow dissension between the ruler and his

The way my father told it,
cousin Alan
was a gunshot wound
through the back of his stomach.
Ant Karen
was a smoker. She died
last winter
without our noticing. No one had seen her
for years. She died
in a condo
somewhere in Florida,
where she left her parents
to arrange the funeral
chairs. My mother had turned to me
and said this,
in the parking lot outside
Salvation Army.

When the fuse went out
with a bang, then
a flare of light,
It felt as if the sun
had exploded
off the upstairs porch
where We were all smoking cigarettes,
and Alex
was drunk and sprawled
across the floorboards. Will
was claiming to have seen God
in the moment of the flash.
The power stayed out for hours,
and the sun died
its usual, casual death
while the house could not turn itself
back on and so
The house grew thick,
then quiet.

stepping into a quiet space

outside the library this afternoon
was the smell of salamander
and the familiar voice inside
my electronic communications box
held to my ear.
The picnic benches were wet then.
It must have rained
while I was in the bathroom.
And earlier a woman had folded out
a book
for me to look at
and she
had talked of maps and the art
of map-making. We were poets, you see,
her and I.
An arrangment of peacocks
was placed against the wall to my right,
her left.
She knew I would be leaving, she said,
she was also going away.
She would have to return
and she also knew
I had no placemats left
to return to, and that
alongside all of these things
and even supposing the existence
of a various assortment
of other, unseen things,
there is still this afternoon
outside the library to attend to.
And there will be tomorrow afternoon
to attend to as well as the next afternoon
after that.

On Sylvia Plath

Her voice floats out through the speakers and she does not sound how I imagined she would. She sounds like a parakeet. She sounds cheerful, even. I imagine her nose by the way she speaks, all I can think of is the shape of her nose. The sound of her voice is the shape of a nose or she speaks through her nose. The interviewer asks his questions slowly and his voice is like a cup of half-cold coffee or a dark bed sheet. The orange cat wishes I would scratch her head. I always feel guilty when they ask to be pet, like they shouldn't have to ask in the first place since I'm the only one that keeps them here. But the orange one always wants me to scratch her head when I am at the green desk. She likes the sound of typing. Maybe when she hears my hands typing all she can think about is what the typing sound would feel like behind her ears, like me with the interview and the sound of her nose. The grey cat comes to see me when I lie down on my lumpy bed and it is usually much easier to be courteous with her. The whole time i was listening to her voice and the man asking questions, I was trying to write down my dream. I have been trying to document all of my dreams and mark them so that one day I will have the most marvelous collection of my dreams and everything will all of a sudden make sense. Maybe I will find how I've been telling the future all the time for everyone, and they'll all be marked by date so that no one can say I'm just making things up now in my old age. But when I heard her voice I couldn't remember any of the dream anymore. I couldn't get past the first sentence and even after In turned the interview off I couldn't remember a thing. It had been a long stringy dream, marvelously odd and complex. I had been excitedto document it but now I haven't even a sketch of it. The trick is to tell someone out loud about it if you aren't going to write it down right away but I mucked it up and it was all because of that nose and that cold coffee voice too asking which foot she leaned her weight on as she stretched across the Atlantic. It was a horrible metaphor but she eventually said that she talked like an American and all I could think was that she talked like a nose even when she was bringing up torture and her voice was not at all what I had pictured it being.