Find Me a Banjo

and I will lay it next to me. Not play it, for you know my fingers are like whiskers, not fit for string. I will let the grass mold around us, soft wind strumming it a nature song. There is a hare up above on the sky, white as a pig’s teeth, it is carried …

Exhaustion

The walls are thin where I live. Every now and then, you can hear through the flimsy partition, a groan so real, I can almost touch it. Even my building is tired of simply existing.

Soul Food

If you come home tonight, we can each have some wild mushroom soup by the kind evening hearth. With every swirl of the brown broth, I swear to forget about the world that does not exist within this ceramic tureen- two Asian white ladles, splitting warmth between themselves, from bowl to spoons, to lips, to …

Intimacy

The older I get, the more I crave 3 P.M. intimacy- sprawled on the sofa, the T.V. on mute, a pile of take-out cardboard boxes forgotten on the table. My head will be against the armrest, my feet on the pillow on your lap; I will be playing with the loose thread on my tank-top …

Parenthesis

This world will be perfectly whole on its own, without me.   I exist, as an addition, an afterthought, but just by being, I will contribute a tiny bit more meaning.

Lend Me Your Wings

Outside my window is a large tree with a hollowed trunk and flat leaves. How tall it stands, spilling over the fence. I imagine what it might have been like to be born beneath its borough, a flower bud waiting in bloom or a squirrel, striped and nimble.   Have you ever dreamed of a …

Coming of Age

Seven years of adulting, and I still feel like I have not arrived. Still searching, waiting for my milk bones to turn stronger, to shoulder adult things. They feel insipidly weak. The bills are being paid, the taps turned off so water does not leak, my body has grown into a woman’s. Yet, I find …

Barfly

Never tell a pariah what to do, or lure him into your midst, for even if he does acquiesce, it will do the world (your world) little good. He, who wages war with the billiards table at three-quarters to four, or disappears to places unknown, long before the sun has stirred the conscience of your …

Wall Art

A fire from last night bit into the light socket, sinking its teeth into the white. The charring spilt over to the surrounding paint; I watched orange leave a trail of black in its wake. It reminded me some of the inferno that rages within at times-- the wiring wringing up the fumes in my …

Education

I went to school. On the first day of class, Sir gave me a wooden box and urged me to climb within. Inside was my syllabus - fourteen thousand four hundred hues of darkness, sewn stiff with shibboleth. Babbage and Bukowski, Ramanujam and Kant, Curie and Rand, (and himself included) pruned my imbecility to indoctrinate …