Issue 161 News Today

If he can make it through February, he’ll be all right. That’s what Joel thinks, all during the wintertime. If he can make it through December, like that old Merle Haggard song David had loved. If he can make it through January. But February is the hardest of all.

The day before you died.A wildebeest chewing on grass. The sun the only thing in the sky.The sky is gray and wet.The moment before is now the second to last moment.The phone is ringing.There is always a closer moment.A rustle in the tall grass behind it. A bubble from the watering hole.I say I love you. You say I know.Every moment leads to another.

I am sitting on a blue chair in a New York City public school classroom in The Bronx staring at a Chromebook screen on a student desk caught in the chilly cross-breeze between the ceiling-high open windows and the open classroom door and I am waiting for my students to show up online and I am trying not to die. 

We were in the jacuzzi when Speedoman entered the pool area and our lives. There were five of us, all sitting spaced apart, the warm water bubbling up to our hairy chests. Outside, it was gray and snowing, the roads icy. We came to the Ford Community Center in the heart of Dearborn, Michigan, every Saturday afternoon to work out—intense cardio followed by weight training—and

[Las Meninas, Velázquez, 1656]When I finally got there let’s say it didn’t matter that on the way over as I was crossing the streeta woman offered me flowers, and I didn’t buy, and she hit me with them, shouting, and the light changed and I fled; didn’t matter whether Madrid felt cold and severe and rainy or cold and magnificent and rainy; made no difference, even, that on New

They talk around the horror. For as long as they can stand it, they talk about stamina, the races they’d been training for, about their weekly mileage, their best split. They talk about their favorite trails and how the foot-give, the quiet, the way the sun crested over the ridge each morning on their last pass brought them peace, accomplishment. A good sweat. They talk

Without the sound of shots fired up the block, like a conversation                    between blown-out tires, and crickets swelling upto mask the dead air after, without the flashlights of policegrazing the windows, and voices relayed in from neighbors’ yards,                     what blessing for this hurtling earth would we have left

Ants line up for a single lick of a lollipop.Locked in my home I don’t need to hunt for food.Downtown Los Angeles is empty skyscrapers.Open their windows and they become really big flutes.The wind sings its way through them.Right to the tents that line the streets.Lined up like ants.The melody is of sirens. Of people.The Governor says we should stay at home.Home is where the

TW: lynchingThere’s a photo of Laura Nelson, a rope between her and a tree. The backdrop, more trees. A person in the picture is bound to history.Bound to the same color.And there’s a sculpture of Mary Turner in bronze holding her stomach. She is childless.Her husband Hazel died a day before her but with less spectacle.I always thought my mother was crazy for the way she wore

Juneau After ten years, recollection’s net           needs mending. I tie-in nylon,                      replacing torn sections, but that is all I know of how to slow forgetting. Recall the kelp            in clumps and strands like God’s oleaginous green           hair clogging our shower drain.