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Buffer Zones

Walkers walk by eyeing my cold coffee as if to ask what do you think of the lyric inventions of the seventeenth century but I don’t think about the seventeenth century, I am distracted by the train whistle and the road construction in the distance which seems further away [...]

Otherness

“I am in exile. Like everybody else, I live in a world that is given to me . . . it is not my native home.” —Paul Goodman, “Speaking and Language,” Defence of Poetry, 1971 A woman I know well has stolen my face. She answers for me when someone asks my [...]

Death by Lightning

I left you in the house, your eyes on me, suffering from a relative of grief, took myself from here to the neighbouring village. I don’t usually walk, preferring donkey or moped, but neither could fare in the weather: rain slopped from eaves turning the streets to streams. [...]

Threshold Clouds

Up a curving road             on a dry gold hill,             you follow at thirty paces.

Sometimes I look back and you’re there,             sometimes not.

I came back to northwest California,             dry grass wind gold ultra blue,             back to late childhóod, when I lóved yóu.

Shadows of spheroid [...]

Life In broad midmorning, a wild streak of handsome ginger, Reynard of the suburban bins, in a lull in the traffic,

Ventured the gap ahead and leapt a high stone wall To the den-paradise of Riddel Woods. Why’s the natural

So consoling? It should surely be otherwise: what can One life mean [...]

The World’s Population Visits the Isle of Wight

Belgium is worried it’s left the iron on so even though it’s next in the ferry queue it turns its busses round and heads back home to check. Denmark is caught up in the traffic blocking every road and sea lane heading for the [...]

A Portrait of a Dog as an Older Guy

When his owner died in 2000 and a new family moved into their Moscow apartment, he went to live with mongrels in the park. In summer there was plenty of food, kids often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff. He didn’t have [...]

Iron Woman

I knew I came from a different place, a story cut apart with scissors. I would find a piece of rust in the morning or a shape in a field through a fog. I would hear a broken language as if spoken by a woman with a bird’s nest on [...]

The Apology Store

I needed an all-purpose apology for the many occasions I had surely forgotten and was to forget. It could be vague and unshaped as the future or distinct as a map of the ancestral country printed in Braille. My funds were unlimited, my purpose a banner of good intentions. [...]