I took your large hand and raised it. Just this, I said, the tip of a finger or two – just to the nail or so – into my mouth, which had dreamed of just that. You made a sound I hoped was a gasp and I wanted – as I had for 30 years […]
Poetry 100
Brandon Thomas DiSabatino: “a portrait of cave fires on walls as the first sitcom in syndication.”
“a portrait of cave fires on walls as the first sitcom in syndication.” the naked, midnight diners are at it again, posed in the windows like an advent calendar across from me. totems of unwashed dishes pile in the sink; heat from hog grease peels their wallpaper back. a nightmare of human real estate. scalloped […]
Brandon Thomas DiSabatino: “tuscarawas river song.”
“tuscarawas river song.” born sightless but going into focus w/ the softness of an acetylene flame – your eyes, blue animals running from their own reflection (torn-into) as a mouth w/ the gums gone open: for hog-tied whippoorwills in mock poses of the living; clouds balled w/ the fists of arthritic […]
BJ Ward: (untitled)
At the wedding, the divorced photographer said to his student apprentice, “Shoot the roses. You’ll get everything else.”
BJ Ward: Musée des Bea Arthur
About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Sit Coms: how well they understood its relation to the comic: Lucy stuffing her mouth with both chocolates and consequence— then with Ethel, in cut-n-dry black-and-white, stomping grapes as if they were globules of female inequity. Later, Ricky waiting for the miraculous birth (miraculous, because the parents […]
BJ Ward: Madagascar
When Juanita, my Toyota Corolla, finally died seven years after our divorce, coughing her last oily “Rosebud” of gray combustion to the gated junkyard hanging above all our heads, her own radio crackled that she’d idle eternally with Buick 8’s and Studebakers, then her radio died too. I tooted her horn and surmised her speedometer, […]