Page 4 - 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 had been ridden all night and woke up wet and intemperateand walked out because of the economy and back without a single pieceof fruit or one end of a halter around a chestnut mare. Spit and hissfrom the electrical, although when the bulbs lit up I was awed andat the same time the slave trade, the treaties torn up and the landgrabbed, and my mother burned in her Marine

We did not make our sea’s idea of order. Yet we are the makers of our ever-hooded. Let me not let be unseemly finales— bulbous racism. That white lamp. Bronze syntactical solenoids latch: Stevens’s affixing despite the beam. Bronzeville’s reddest room ablated by a whitest house fixture. Let me not let be his unseemly remark when Brooks won the Pulitzer. Let me not let be I

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

I wouldn’t know, but when I imagine being there in the roomwith the real thing, its many glowing painted sections are nearlyweightless, and they float, silent, barely held together by their frames,and in the darkness, in my head, they fold slightly, hinged wingsthat make me want to go in them, walk the green field, be amongthe crowd of devotees—which I am not, not Christian,

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

After Robert Creeley Bitten night spilling sharps. Lowing clouds eye the Pinelawns of dead influences to me. I’ll never live in a house with a woman who writes under an uneasingly settling sun. Contrapuntal outruns cannons. Darkness thousand rounds us to bed. Love for one all my rest. My mind too a mangle is.

His car is a nervous breakdown, scattering chrome along the motorway. He gasps through panic attacks in tunnels and medieval towers. The falconry display goes on regardless and eejits in velour have a crack at each other with plywood lances. I’m in fugue state, headphones glued to me as mum calls to accuse him of kidnapping. Come for a drink, he says. No. Retreat to the

Cropping the image I see how sparse the yield this year of further wearing—  I find my way there by fewer paths but know those fewer paths more intensely, the bits I have lost are not lost to the greater picture, and when I saw it closely, obscurely, or in panorama, I could see what would be hidden from me. A wasp’s single mud cell, the crumpled body of a window spider tapping