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October 9, 2024
Flattened stone floor, covered
in wooden slats, the portico
with columns and even arches,
not exactly the porch
the other house (our same floor
plan doubled into something else)
had across our common grass.
October 2, 2024
It is not a beautiful day in Mexico City unless you can see Popocatépetl. In this place, beauty is determined solely by whether or not the volcano breaches the nebulous smog like a visitation, by whether the eye can ascend its snow-covered face. When what was sensed but veiled yesterday is suddenly revealed today, it is, in the smallest way, a faith realized.
 
September 25, 2024
My eyes were already fixed on the face
Of My Lady, and my mind with them—
All other thoughts had been wiped away.

She wasn’t smiling; instead, she began:
“If I were smiling, you’d become
Like Semele when she was turned to ashes,
September 18, 2024
We were picnicking on the plains
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig.
September 11, 2024
With floret centers so prolific
they turn—furred caterpillar folds?
zipped mouths? burn marks?—
the quite contrary daisy faces grow
dense in Mary’s garden.
September 4, 2024
He woke from a dream.

He was in the garage of an old house,
riding one of those toy horses
held to a metal frame by springs.
It was not very fast, not very curious
about the horizon.
August 21, 2024
I made sandwiches with the bresaola from the antipasto the afternoon before and some of the gouda I'd cut thinner from the cubes. I tried to feed the boy some of the gouda and a little bread, but he wouldn't have any. I suspected it was the traces of vinegar, they clashed with the white bread—it was all we had—or maybe it was just an odd new combination of flavors he didn't understand yet. But what was left over would likely get lost in the refrigerator where things were perpetually being pushed back behind more saved food, this striated order of aging and forgetting—food saved until eating what was left at the far back was unwise. Like memory, the economy of our minds repressing one moment for the next and leaving the past like a set of traps that might go off at any moment.
August 14, 2024
Maybe the Leather Skulls were no longer the titans of the death metal scene they used to be in the late eighties. Were they titans then? They had a following, a snug cult of enthusiasts. Their admirers were scarcer now, sure, but as they circled the continent on their latest comeback tour in honor of their eleventh album, The Devils He Casteth Out, the band could still fill bars and small ornate theaters with diehards—haggard bikers and their biker wives, with jazzed up hair and fatal shades of lipstick. The concerts were like nostalgia galas, reenactments of the past. One more spin on the crazy train.
 
August 7, 2024
A trench of barkless trees. Slim black sweater
arched like a claw. Thimbles of the heart and spine
overflown. The halfway trucks, the drivers inside
dislodge wax from their bodies to the tune of a pulverizing
sun streak. Up toward Ohio, geometry for the pupils
to control light. I treat the shoulder as range,
July 31, 2024
I am the screen of heaven,

homely and undone, strand

by strand, whose

scant beauty emits

glare, distracting from

the absence it

would be, and

desires to become.
July 24, 2024
On Valentine’s Day, Milo strings a horse-shaped piñata from the ceiling light in our living room, and I walk by twice before noticing it swaying there. The light is off and the horse is dark, but I am not unobservant. Part of me accepts a horse swinging in my periphery. Milo makes up a real reason for me to go back down the hall and, when I look for the space heater, I find the horse hanging. He dangles from a yellow jump rope, and I am so happy to see him in my house. Milo hands me the stick. “You need,” he says, “to kill a horse.”
 
July 17, 2024
There is the man on the moon. Go to him. Get bread from him, drink his water. Take your dog, Blue to him. Take your mother. She is skiing outside around the house. Stop her, tell her that Blue is going also. Take the gander, Henry. He is short in the legs. Leave me Iris. I have seen her eat feed in a pattern.
 
July 10, 2024
Marcie decided on Vertigo because she’d recently encountered several texts in quick succession that made extensive reference to it: Chris Marker’s time travel film told in still images, La Jetée, Terry Gilliam’s unlikely Hollywood adaptation, 12 Monkeys, and a story by Bennett Sims called “White Dialogues” about an embittered academic seething in an auditorium during a lecture being given by the hot new thing in Hitchcock studies. The coincidence made her feel involved with the film, and vice versa, in a way that evades more specific description.
July 3, 2024
We slapped together two clods of oak around a broken bedpan lid and twined them together with a horsetail. Realized then our discovery: the first knife ever. We go to Tony’s. Tony indicates our find—What is that shit?—and he slides us each a prairie fire: whisky, tabasco. Crab says, Maybe lean forward, Tony, and Tony, doing so, discovers the knife sinking in buttery smooth, right between his ribs.
 
June 26, 2024
Moments lately, I think I am on the brink of an epiphany, swept right to the threshold by, say, the pulp of a grape or the progress of a Beethoven sonata or some other spiritual force, and were I to cross over it, loosed into the light of that knowledge, it would also mean my days on earth are numbered, that I have understood all that is needed before this life meets its resolution. But each time I am held back, caught by the hem of my shirt, denied whatever I thought I might see, allowed it only in periphery.
 
June 19, 2024
I am sorry for not writing sooner. To be completely frank, I was afraid of receiving a response and knowing for certain that you’re finished with me. I am very troubled by the way we’ve left things.
 
June 12, 2024
It took place in London at the end of the seventeenth century—a man was spending the evening at home, often thinking of a friend of his, a woman, who was very ill, worrying about her, hoping she would live, when there was a knock on the door, and she entered, looking fine, thriving, in fact, and sat down in a normal way and began a normal conversation, though she seemed a little more serious than usual until he began to cry, at which she continued quietly, discussing things of the soul, aspects of time, and he began to sob, and she continued speaking quietly, as he sobbed and sobbed, and when he finally looked up she was gone.
June 5, 2024
I’ll just speak for myself. This seems to be the best plan. When you try to speak on behalf of others you run into trouble. See? Already I has become you, but I cannot be you. But you can come along with me, at my side if you like, even if my walk is a bit awkward and you probably want to move more quickly over the terrain. Probably you wouldn’t say “terrain.” You would say ground or path or street. These choices don’t amount to a disagreement, just a different habit of mind. The mind’s terrain. Just now my mind’s terrain is a bit foggy, a bit dreary. It feels, inside of this fog, quite empty, as if, when the fog lifts, there will be nothing but an expanse uninflected by things to see or do, undisturbed by names and places, recollections and glimpses into other times and other places.
May 29, 2024
A tree stump, leg’s length, scorched black. Dragging slowly through snow sand so as not to take down any of the edges. The grains leave a fine film on the hand. One of several wood pieces to help prop up the broken end of the vessel for repair. I am stranded, marooned, run aground. Struck from the sky by something unseen in the night. How I might attempt to lift the vessel onto the stumps by myself remains to be seen. I have been hauling the dead remains of trees to the site for days. Behind me always, a perfect trail of depressed sand snow snaking into the distance. The wind is merciless so there is no evidence of my circuitous journey. With each step, each push of the log, a gust comes and smooths everything away.
May 22, 2024
Now that the bumblebees are sounding in the yard, sprint to the garden store in your tank top with your poodle as if there is a headwind. Stub a toe. Hear the tick of the clock as you place your items on the trolley: a new houseplant, two and three: a philodendron since you already have a few and they grow so nicely. Pay for mulch. Get some stones while you’re at it. Some daisies for the back. Black-eyed Susans too.
The internationally renowned writer will read from her work.
Monday, October 21, 2024
4:00 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Chapel of the Holy Innocents