( Here's what's up these days + pictures of the cat [as always!] )

[Trigger warning: Brief mention of self-injury]

Taste of Cherry by Kara Candito

1. There is no way to tell this story.

How she said come with me
and you did, you followed her into the bed
                    of a stolen truck, into that bar
          where you shot the bartender

and made everyone watch ( Read more... )

Relax by Ellen Bass

Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she ( Read more... )

And Speaking of the Space Between Actions by Jessica Dawson
in the

split seconds
before come and get it
becomes oh god don't stop,

I picture how many
strands
of your hair
I can fit in one fist and,
of those,
how many will break loose
with your first thrust
and find themselves
stray, stuck to our bodies
like wet stars.

He told her I fuck like a man.

I say
someone ( Read more... )

Bad Girl by Kim Addonizio

She's the one sleeping all day, in a room
at the back of your brain. She wakes up
at the sound of a cork twisted free
of a bottle, a stabbed olive

plopped into gin. She's prettier than you
and right now you bore the shit out of her,
sitting there sipping when she wants
to stand on the rim of the glass, naked,

dive straight to the ( Read more... )

The moon versus us ever sleeping together again by Richard Brautigan

I sit here, an arch-villain of romance,
thinking about you. Gee, I'm sorry
I made you unhappy, but there was nothing
I could do about it because I have to be free.
Perhaps everything would have been different
if you had stayed at the table or asked me
to go out with you to look at the ( Read more... )

About Friends by Brian Jones

The good thing about friends
is not having to finish sentences.

I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once
on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud
and watching the small chunks slide into the water
and listening to them - plop plop plop.
He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know...
like that.' I said, ' ( Read more... )

Calling a Distant Animal by W.S. Merwin

Here it is once again this one note
from a string of longing

tightened suddenly from both ends
and held for plucking

tone torn out of one birdsong
though that bird

by now may be
where a call cannot

follow it
the same note goes on calling

across space and is heard now
in the old night and known there

a silence recognized
( Read more... )

How To Make Amends by David James

He was hungry, so he ate the couch, the one with the pull-out bed. Of
course, when the wife came home, she was disgusted.
            “Now what will we sit on, asshole? Last week it was the coffee table; the
week before, two kitchen chairs and a lamp. What next, the bed?”
            He hadn’t thought of ( Read more... )

The Farmer by Jeffrey McDaniel

There's a field where I grow only bruises,
inner gnawing, and heartache.

Each Saturday I harvest the crop,
haul it to the open-air market, and sell it
straight from my flatbed truck.

Fresh agony only three bucks a bushel.
Sun-dried torment by the pound.Seven years running, my pain ( Read more... )