ignia

Laced up sneakers penitentiary brew genuflecting more than usual lately been at the bottom of too many hills and eaten a lot of strangers' pills I discovered the dark self emptying cupboards and pantry shelves and stealing away into the thick Maine woods again at one a.m.

A long time ago I froze like an insect, a praying mantis mantled with a curse, and watched the dirty sun, his worst eye-catcher. For hours now he’s been still as gold and glass, dusty as chin-height china: thinking of his father and the fall of the antebellum oak. Memory of it’s sifted as if ground down summer-soft. He used to curse, swearing to injure time herself. To see him now calls them in like a hanging. All the smallest doubts, knuckle-rough like ravens with their throaty shouts: please us and hold us down.

Lately I've been having dreams: living things, crashing again and again, stronger and weaker, baring teeth and pepper-tongued rage. You flipped the page just before I was through. Were it up to you, my heart would be shot through with holes like the needles of the past were all at once unlatched. Your sweat taunts me, sticks your shirt to your spine, makes your knees wet, harrows me. Somewhere above, five hawks cycled through today on a wheel from the west. Tell me I haven't laughed in days. I want to feel incredulous again, and touched with sin, and nearly home, but you know well the darkness of a Montana night. Drive to meet me at the

When faced with a river of colors without forms and shot through with liquid rock, salt and chalk and leaking what looks like oil, you, a formal mess, search blindly back and bat-like through time. The flashes come and with rum-filled softness curb you. Like any other mess you've made your living from a parity - as much of living as of rest, testing breaths against a symmetry: what reflected back and what remains. Only an error of judgment at the center, a mountain road no traveling obtains. Round again flown back to home, a smooth stone riddled rough and singing - refrain, refrain, refrain.

She stitched so much skin to that hurricane, drained and pulling at cotton threads, sucking on leaves and statues' feet. So she couldn't see for the storm of him. If she pulled him he'd say don't wait for the raincloud to jump right in again. A paradox in a pile of wind with a dream pinched in, he was a storm with a stick, an old man leaning on sinking beams, a cat in a roadside hedge, hitting tires every now and again. She watched him circle, drinking wine; she cackled at the static. In the air his arms were bare, in the dewless morning drying. If she charged him with murder, he'd laugh and say don't we both know that the temp

This wine is an earthbound vessel that you take in two long drinks: one gets you to the border and the other sets you past it. You may well do this alone, for transport knits the spirit to the storm clouds as surely as cellars keep more keys than secrets in them, and there are embers dissolved in this glass like a cottage-light hidden in hills: each sip in the stairwell is a step from the lantern hung outside and floating, or footprints from a door opened wholly onto evening. You are made liminal and blurred out by it, wine soft as candlelight spun round in darkness. It holds a deep fire-lighted will and has always had th

Hanging photos with sunrise precision. My walls, grid-like, artists displayed to the same degree as the chipping white paint. I missed the true Renaissance while I was out smoking. Drawing in smoke I unfocus all I let go. A part of the blue from my eyes, one or two flaring-out moments of contact, small in relation to pinecones and other chipped seeds, softer and infinitely more piercing in relation. Showering, the cool tile, my palms coursing. Hot water tracing lines with mountainous precision. Lets me smoke one cigarette at lunch, one at dinner, and one while I sit in my windowsill while night’s cup-like hand covers my face