Forthcoming in Dark Mountain Issue 6

A story of mine, 'The Shrine,' will be included in the Dark Mountain Project's literary journal, out this September. Very excited!

Check out Dark Mountain here:
http://dark-mountain.net/

After Trout Fishing in America

The city is in my blood now, like irreducible plastic beads, like the gyres of styrofoam in the sea.

~

The sand beside the sea was recently below the sea and where it has not been stepped on it lies in a perfect arching plane, parabolic curves of a hard crust. The coarse grains are held in a crust of salt that breaks suddenly when touched, as though it had dreamt of falling apart since it emerged from the sea.

~

Children break the crust of sand with their feet like robots poorly designed for the purpose.

~

Like a robot, a created thing, my blood is the city, all the people and buildings run, like an upturned chess set in a drain pipe, through my heart and veins.

~

Most people don’t play chess.

On Security

In South Korea, it’s Teachers’ Day. The wind comes out of the west, snaps the flags, the clouds boil. My students give me a package of cookies and a note: We will always be grateful to you for your support and kindness. The Sewol ferry sinking, the deaths of hundreds of teenagers, is the only thing on the news. The girls laugh in the halls. They wear yellow ribbons to remember the dead. My facebook feed is full of wedding photos. Also advertisements. The Antarctic ice sheet has heard its death knell. It will melt, unstoppable.

School Poems

Old women

                   scrape weeds
from the cracks
                   so the pavement
can go on
                   another year.


. . .

Now on the Dark Mountain Blog

Very excited and honored to be included in the Dark Mountain Blog. See my work here, and please go on to read the high quality writing they are constantly posting:

Analogous Structures

dispatches from nowhere #5

In This World

In this world, the tiniest life creates you. In tireless work microbes construct you beneath the soil, this quiet and appropriate place to conceive a being. You won’t remember this, but it is how it happens. Above ground, the others are stalking the forest, retrieving their loneliness, their grief. Meanwhile, your pale and riven face is composing itself in the darkness.

When it’s time the others unearth you.  They brush the soil from your vestments, your eyelids, which have yet to open. The hum in your nerves is still incoherent, still dispersed. The microbes that will be you are still grieving as they put you together.

The others carry you to the house, lay you in the bed. It is here you come awake, your eyes fluttering open, a rattle in your throat. Your family is all around, the pain dissolving from their faces as you come into the world.