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If Jenn were a table, she’d be solid mahogany, much like the rest of the furniture in this stereotype of an open-floor-plan space. Except Dan could feel her chest heaving against him, her ribcage pressing into his flesh. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pushing her toward the door. She stood in place, steadfast, her back rooted against the wall.
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.
Detailed descriptions of a father’s brutality. Graphic images of a boy, dreaming about food at night, his stolen transistor radio spilling James Brown’s good, good lovin over his pillow. This poem may unfold, in detail, a husband’s violence toward a wife. May run time in a circle. May reveal the husband’s plush red hands abbreviating his wife’s neck on a crisp November
The last day of April, showers and all. A clammy rain that’s less than refreshing. Water wrung from a mildewed sponge.The fog slips the city into a dress made of gauze. Wildlife plops itself onto lawns.Bunnies, bunnies everywhere! Like big plump hopping loaves of bread.Like children we crave people to examine our wounds. Like Christ we show our wounds reluctantly to
[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