Ginny

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, the one written by Stravinsky for 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 he

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,...

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 eupheuism, between two heavy stones, can sedimentize and crack a coarser silt that dissolves in boili

To trust the writer of tidy endings is to trust the painter of perfect faces. I’d rather follow those who explain the gridlike struc-...

An unperformable play. We open on an urban Caribbean plaza, the main square in a capital city. It is late morning. There are tourists...

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 can you not see in front of you behind you and ahead? i wish i could...

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 cantado otra vez las palabras dichas además de mi corazón latiendo como ojo parpadeando como...

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...

My love for you lies still, a nut in its densest shell, vibrating. You spun the smoke of the past and blew it in my eyes. Until now I...

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...

I like working at the Pyg, because it reminds me of a sandwich shop in Lincoln Park near DePaul University called the Bourgeois Pig. They played Hot Club Jazz for an attic of us hyperfocused grad students feverishly typing away at our Macs.  The keyboard sounds offered Django some polyrhythm. Normally, people approach me at the Pyg and, in heavily accented French, request a Guinness. A "wee-ness." "Zhih prawn awn wee-ness." I'd smile at the unintentionally phallic nature of t

You opened your mouth  and out came the sound of glass shattering I stood up and walked slowly, deliberately, away from you, glass...

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...