Judo

The karate school smelled of dust & sweat, my wooden nunchucks stained pink by my father. It's why in most of my dreams I'm fighting, those twelve-year spars still invade my head, but what a power it was, to be fifteen & know, for certain, I could throw a grown man over my head. It's all about balance, you see, &

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I Didn’t Need These Things

I snored in saxophone, drooling into the pillow like I'd just lost a tooth, & we slept shirtless, but we didn't have sex. Just kissed, the rain pounding against the roof windows, we looked through it last night & almost saw the future, shimmering with that rainbow which gleams from the backside of CDs. Sometimes I still find notes in the center console in my car,

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Dear Deer,

I hit you already-dead, soft speedbump, jolting as flesh spewed onto my windshield like hail. I had been in my own fantasies of being touched by the vegetarian boy and his large, muscular hands. His guitar playing hands. His voice over the strung out reverberation of my car speakers, cluttered in tin cans and CDs. Trash everywhere. Rotting carcass of a plum that had been eaten…

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Cassius to Brutus

Fuck, dude, all of these giants & technobillionaires making our stars into a game of marbles, flicking bombs off in countries far enough away that we can simply change the channel when they come on—we simple people stand under their tables, under their stairs, we get stepped on & crushed like those idiots on the Titan Submersible, like those video of hydraulic…

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Paradise Lost

Sometimes you're most present In processed foods. Ranch dressing, Milk-dipped Oreos, hot Cheetos, Nesquik. When I went through my Marxist phase I abstained for a while. Those Big Brands, all greed & unethical labor & chemicals my mother says will give me cancer & the overwhelming fact is that it is difficult to remember you. I wish your laugh would return,

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The Man Caving In

When the effects of gin wore off, at the second rehab facility, he stood in the parking lot & stabbed himself with a Swiss Army Knife. His innards were as pink as asbestos & foam insulation, his intestines like a second story, unfurnished & wild. It didn't work out like he planned. They called 911 & he lived. So he took up spelunking…

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Red Knots

It was Wednesday morning in the early cracking of summer. I lay in bed damp with sweat, in a private room on the second floor of a two-story house on the edge of town near the shallow portion of the river. It could almost vanish in the row of houses, each in varying degrees of disarray. A few missing boards here, a porch drifting down at an acute angle, peeling paint, and cracked brick, its dusty rust color muted by years of exhaust.

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QUARTERLY UPDATES ON [1] CORPORATE HAUNTING

Q3 – FIRST FALL When I start the job, I do some security training, and then they tell me I'll be working with B, but I don't work with B, not ever. I type up long emails to B, and he never replies, always forwards them to Celia, his secretary, and all she tells me is to set up time on his calendar, but all I see are blocks of busy.

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Toward Evening

On the lake at Anguillara, around seven in the evening, there is a light that comes in low and strikes the water. It is dark blue, nearly cruel, and cuts across the lake from side to side. For a moment the sky stops looking down on everything and reflects itself on earth, in this mirror. The melancholy leaves. My father is beside me.

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A Language of an Older Time

In the grey mid-morning We rise to the water in the trees, To the thrumming rainfall Bruising branches, scattering leaves. The sun gilds the sycamores On the forest's brighter edge, Brings mossy branches rollicking Down to lie in boisterous wreckage On the brook's glassy surface. A small doe drinks from the water, Her pink mouth dripping With moonshot icefloe from the mountains.

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The Nightfisher

Then with evening steps The nightfisher comes to trace with weary Tread anew that cliffside amble From Beacon Hill with lofty lighthouse Down towards that ashen bay Where lies the whale carcass. Its mass of flesh is all grimdark in the spray Of salty ambergris swirling round This Leviathan's limp and fetid corpse. Blacker than this middle night Of starless, cloudless, windless nighthaven…

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Contingencies

A white wafter moon. A bare, spindly silhouette of a willow crowned by a hunched heron where the creek silvers into the bay. An archaic stillness composed just so with the perfect grammar of the absolute spoken down the path you didn't take. Mike Dillon is an essayist and poet who lives in a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle.

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Learned Helplessness

Sixty years ago Martin Seligman placed dogs in inescapable cages electrified so the dogs would always be electrocuted. The dogs gave up and lay in pain on the electrified cages. An ample parable, if anything. Sometimes I purchase a cheap donut though I know I can't have more than one bite for, you guessed it, that one bite. I can feel it traveling through digestion like a swallowed pebble…

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Personify everything

Personify everything if you please. Names and affect and joking histories which reveal the promise time is a collaborative construction always I have knockoff brands of my prescription in case of shortages like I have been going through now for months and they each have personalities based on the weirdness they make my body feel. The inevitability of creation is just another clawing mechanism.

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Poem in which I am simultaneously ill and a pilot for a giant mech in some non-dystopic future

Sometimes I think my way into 2001's Zoids: New Century's Naomi Fluegel zoid Gunslinger which is something like a basilisk lizard if its tail was a long-barrel rifle or even the mechsuits of 1997's Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz which introduced the concept of interstellar wars with no casualties except for the murder of one's own brutal ruler because sometimes I yearn to exist…

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Misunderstand me

Mystical how dying really makes one consider death If I die know I was shaking ass in my death bed Death is the thing in the balloon If Emily Dickinson were alive she would be a clowngirl If Wallace Stevens were alive he would write on substack When I die know I was thinking about another scheme to try and get my friends fed.

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Animals in the sun

paws over shells white sands corroded edges prying hag stones tide foam tumbles avoiding smoke and laughter last birds overhead shadows are cold slush but only before legs submerge: I throw my glasses another separation gone what is the difference drinking the wet of ocean air flowers travelling like tea steeped in a drain like the man who beat his dog and then beat me…

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An Introduction to a Stranger

We are defined against something, by what we are not and will never be. Who will read this slim volume of mine, and with what preconceptions? A poet I admire once told an English audience: we must call out monolingualism, since the world has forever been multilingual. There are many reasons for my writing in your language. Ask your government, ask…

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Substitute

I have become that person. I put my dog in a sweater, stick his little legs through arm holes, gently. I say, be a good little boy. I hand feed him, cut up pieces of steak, French fries. I order the vanilla ice cream so we can share. I cradle twenty pounds of fur in my arms, face nuzzled in his soft, tan coat.

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Groundhogs Day

I don't tell him the days anymore. He used to count with me, sew the possibilities to his inner wrists. Now, hope is an anchor inked to skin. He doesn't want to go through it again. And I understand that— But I am not promising anything. I understand what the last time did: the utter wreck of it all, but still,

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How Small is a Mustard Seed?

The first loss remains a shadow on the screen. The tech says, tests look good, but you have already memorized the geometry of a ghost. There are no little joys now, just intervals of relief. Every calendar a precursor: if, not when. After the fourth time, nobody tells you to pray. Even the faithful stop pretending. Still, you dry heave over the sink,

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Folk Party

I’m twenty-five, and it’s a regular Thursday when you turn up at the bookstore. You look so much like when I saw you last, I think for a second I really have to be dreaming. I’ve …

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Autopsy Report

My mother’s autopsy report is kept in a Thom McCann shoebox in the closet. It was put there by my father, where he kept other documents. Five years later he dies of a heart attack when I am 2…

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a scold of jays

when offering sunflower seeds one needed patience: only approaching your offer in earnest with careful apprehension was possible: much like the cautious blue jays taking crumbs from the old man&#82…

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Ode: Clothes

“I wear green for the sake of the kingfishers.&…

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The Words

Even when I tore and crumpled the paper the outline of the words that I offered to you remained on the next page. Laurehl Onyx B. Cabiles writes from Carmen, Cotabato Province. He has been a fellow…

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Morning Maverick

can you hear the coyotes cackling? familia. sharks are older than fire and trees and saturn’s rings. ancient ancestors. hold my hand. and maybe breathing is an art, an invitation to sit there…

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summer solstice

not a grave, adirondacks             rain and mama coalesce through summer, through years        &nbsp…

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Stories from the End of the World

Attenuated men and their weary, warring wives slump in front yards drinking from cans. Broken dolls complain-brag on the street, hands over their hearts. I know them as intimately as my bed. Learni…

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On the way to Cable Bay

At the open door of a Stone Age burial chamber, I peer into the mossy gloom and whisper ‘hello.’ Rain clouds mass above the tomb. The trail does not end here: a path zigzags along the c…

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