my soul was rent asunder by a jigsaw of ice and fire that tore my flesh i was left jagged and alone drowning in the gore of indolence i gathered myself into a burlap sack in justification of nothing and scattered my ashes into the winds — ptkh 04.30.10
Month: April 2010
Moments #2
Out beyond the fields behind the elementary school, there were seasonally transitory ponds that attracted various wildlife, such as ducks and frogs. This is where the fanged ones lived. We never went out there; the farthest we’d go was the edge of the ball diamond, where the adults would put up markers to let us…
the unspoken wall
she’d seen the unspoken wall every day, and every day she’d wondered how to take it down a wall between him and her a ghostly veil that shimmered at the edge of her vision yet invisible when stared right at she told herself it was the wall that kept them apart she told herself that…
Plink-plink-plink
In the distance: Gunshots. In the foreground: A young girl crouches by a gutter grate, poking leaves from last autumn in between the cast iron bars and listening to the plink-plink-plink of pebbles falling into the water down below. She is black. She is wearing a school uniform. Her hair is in pigtails, held in…
Moments #1
At the end of a long pier, beneath an autumn evening’s sky, over the water that was growing chilly with the coming winter’s winds, in between two otherwise unnoteworthy moments in a constant stream of mentally photographed breaths, as a skip in the fabric of a thumping monotony of similitude, I saw on the island…
Raise High the Gondola Oars
The day JD Salinger died, I was standing near St Mark’s Square watching the pigeons attack a tourist who’d been too reckless with a handful of seeds. The weather was overcast, the clouds hung low like marshmallow soufflĂ©, water in the distance slapping against idle gondolas. A brawny Venetian on his way to the kilns…
Poem for Somebody
I drew you a picture in colored sand and let the wind blow it away. I hope it landed at your feet and that you could still make out the traces of what was meant to have been. I sent you a message in puffs of smoke that mingled with the clouds that rained on…