Ginny

Ah, humanity: the headless hitchBOT on a Pennsylvania park bench.

I’m not sure what time of day it was when my headlamp began to dim. AYUDA. HELP. HILF. AIDEZ-MOI. HELP HERE. HELFEN. BITTE. No one else would be wandering under a kilometer of foreign dolomite. Face-down in a belly crawl within a collapsing vein of a narrow sinkhole, left arm forward and right arm folded tight to my hip, I was suspended over a clear blue pool twitching with translucent salamanders and cave insects. I ached to fall into it headlong--if the water was shallow,

I lay awake in bed late one night, frozen in the shadow of a figure in my doorway: a six-foot three amigurumi man. I made him, tediously, in my garage—it took years off me. The wool spun hot through my hands as I wove his tan skin and fringed his Western-style jacket and slacks. Screaming fingers balmed with sheep grease, I crocheted a pair of mosaic-pattern cowboy boots for my Man. He wears a size 11.5. He must have cost me a million in wool, as stuffing alone came from a Do

I met you on HAM radio in the 90s— you snatched a butterfly off a birch tree and showed me the powder from its wings on your amputated pointer finger, on the stub. We’d quarrel angrily over walkie talkie— you’d shout the plans for our campsite on the rez, and I’d shout over you that we never talk like a normal parent and child do. I’d help you perform surgery, via cup and string, and I’d hand you a fly fishing rig when you’d asked for the vacuum tube. After you die, we’ll div

Ideally, I’d like someone anonymous I can send art that makes me laugh, like Frank O’Hara’s poem about Lana Turner collapsing. We would live within walking distance but we’d definitely avoid each other. They wouldn’t ask too many ambiguous questions but rather demonstrate unearthly wit and teach me every thing I don’t know about astrophysics. It would be a great comfort to know what’s out there. We would never touch or even really see each other, but we would be inseparable.

Harrowing as the day I was born —I think— you lamented about how you briefly forgot the love of your life--like driving a small pin into a toe pad inebriated with bathwater, you related the story to me--and the backs of my eyelids remembered that ear-worm Pathetique from the opera about the giantess who fell into unrequited love with an ogre. We watched it develop at the Civic, up in the nosebleeds and you placed your hand on the back of my head to lure me in, a riptide, and

I wonder what you looked like today, the day when I erased you from my mind. It didn’t emerge from bitterness; not an eviction but a slow expiration, like the shrinking of a bright balloon.

I'll wait: not like some fanged or taloned thing, but like drumlins lain regiment on cold plains, the last bullfrog rasping in the wood, or a silken arm of driftwood driven upright into barren sand. And I'll be patient: not like orb weavers at the center of iron-clad webs, but casually radiating like the tannined fingers of early-morning frost, or a fiddle- head in an erratic summer, awaiting unfurling. If you don’t follow— like roots devising their own way toward nurturing g

Remember that, the week I had convinced my bloated words to elope with me in the Riviera to sit, my placid subject; wear a Turkish robe in ways I could evince them? Akimbo in marital bed, the purplest words I minced, milled to gunpowder, and a combustive flare of hostile dust and physical power scared up hard times marked by The Struggle. In time since, I'd worked to find my euphemism, between two heavy stones, can sedimentize and crack a coarser silt that dissolves in boilin

To trust the writer of tidy endings is to trust the painter of perfect faces. I’d rather follow those who trace the gridlike struc- ture of plants, the mandalas within topography, and the ways life’s aberrations form agate innards with veiny parallels.

An unperformable play. We open on an urban Caribbean plaza, the main square in a capital city. It is late morning. There are tourists toddling around with fanny packs and sunglasses taking up each other's space, the sweat just beginning to seep out of them. A school group wearing the same t-shirt trudges woundedly through the burgeoning crowd on their way to a hostel with their luggage, the sun intruding rudely on their bedtime. It looks like they're returning home from war,

there once was a springtime dill lavender blue the scene never softer in nival review the serpent, the may queen danced fate’s minuet...

some instances deserve no words and some words deserve no instance i wish i could go back to the times where i was at my most beautiful i wish you could have seen me at my most beautiful or was it only you didn't want me at my most beautiful most of the time i think, i should stop thinking about it but then i remember in order to tell myself to stop thinking i must have thought it in the first place i realize without having to realize it my only desire was to keep you at your

in the living room, on the embroidered couch the light was dim, the only sign of death was in the air the stale fetor of yellow tail my...

el chiste es tan viejo la canción ha sido cantada otra vez las palabras dichas además de mi corazón latiendo como ojo parpadeando como aliento inspirado como un disco roto y ¿qué será la historia? no tendría principio ni fin y nada en medio sin objeto mi mente es tan vacia como un libro abierto las palabras leídas sueños repetidos parecería que no tenga nada para decir las cosas envueltas en hojas de plátanos en un contén de Tupperware en datos científicas en los pañales de

i'm sitting at marthes's piano, my fingers gliding across the new keys. new pianos are like new shoes--you have to break them in and get...

i used to sit on a bench, waiting for you watching the blue cranes picking up their feet watching the grass grow from the foreign soil that was my home i used to listen to the footsteps of the people i used to listen to the footsteps of the sun walking slowly across the sky i miss walking with you there i used to feel my stomach clench like a fist when i saw you walking towards me growing like moss giving me my bearings together our arms entwined we used to walk past the quee

You called me Uvas I still have bug-eyes it was endearing it was myopia We’d stick branches wrapped in spiderwebs into trees’ knots...

You opened your mouth and out came the sound of glass shattering I stood up and walked slowly, deliberately, away from you, glass popping and crackling under bare feet I had wandered for miles on oven-hot asphalt and you had my shoes and you were walking backwards My legs followed your legs in intimate tangoes your right leg back my left leg forward we danced for years in this way Until you opened your mouth and out came the sound of glass shattering And at that moment I s

An anvil did not drop on your head today. That is one blessing you can count, I suppose. Though you may have still felt gripped in vices of time and loneliness, wondering if your presence is reduced to time spent on or within some machine proving nothing to no one, You are that chaos's construction and its deconstruction. That is one blessing we can count, I suppose.