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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.
He measured things—all things. I pictured that he took a tape out and drew notch to notch from end to end, even though it didn’t work that way. The drawings on paper he laid on the table before us were ideas. The database was building, online.“What is it for? I asked him. I had seen him, lean and handsome, at a table alone in the bar and I joined him. He was an architect by
The two-edged sword of being human and knowing it: blades of grass never compare themselves to an oak or look in mirrors. I never love you more than when I watch you look at your reflection and relish what you see. Only a human would do something so dirty and shrewd and divine. When you touch me you turn me into rose quartz clouds, into the shadow of a hawk passing over car
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.
It sounds, at first, like a bird. The way birds sound. Caws and chirps and trills. Occasionally, the tree will shimmy in the place it has made its home. The leaves will rustle to indicate there is an animal inside the tree.