The Gift
One of the first ways people encounter poetry in some form is often through nursery rhymes. At this stage, poetry paves the way to language acquisition through word play, focusing on rhyme, repetition, and rhythm. As we grow, we leave these rhymes behind, learning to use direct, imperative language to communicate our needs and wants efficiently: I’m hungry. No. I’m leaving. The childish poems fall away with the vulnerability and play of the early years. If we do not grow up in households that read poetry, or households that read at all, often the next time we encounter poetry is […]
What I’ve Been Reading
Perhaps thanks to Joyelle McSweeney’s Dead Youth, or, the Leaks: a play in 4 acts (2014), which is also a closet drama a la Goethe or Gertrude Stein and thus perfectly amenable to the theatrophobic—pertinent to our interrupted spectacle?—I have been excavating for leaks. It is hard to believe that this poem, or play, is pre-Trump-era, pre-Covid-19. Wait a second. That isn’t hard to believe at all. DEAD YOUTH 2: What a day at the races. DEAD YOUTH 1: It’s hard work, this afterlife (25). Everything accelerates in late capitalism. What oozes comes from what is; whatever is contained nonetheless transmits. […]
Searching For The Melody
My memory strains. My sister asks, ‘Remember that cake you made last Christmas?’ Nope. 2019 Christmas. I don’t remember a thing. She shows me a photo. ‘Oh, that cake.’ Vaguely. Not really. My words tangle. ‘Bussel spouts for dinner, looking for a par cark.’ I am dimmer. Christmas cracker jokes pass undeciphered over my purple paper crown. Hand the pork crackling. I’d fail a mini-mental test. Person, woman, television—how did it go again? 2020. What was the name of the Monty Python guy who died? And Black Panther, the famous basketballer? Reach for my phone. No small forgotten fact emerges […]
Armie Hammer and A Very Meaty Sexual Fantasy
Elbowing its way through last week’s COVID/incursion/ COVID/impeachment news stream, was the completely outrageous ‘what in the weird’ story alleging that Armie Hammer is a cannibal. What? Indeed. But let’s rewind a bit. Armie Hammer is the heir to the Armand Hammer oil dynasty. Armie played Oliver in the lovely Call Me By Your Name and both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network. And in recent days women have branded him a cannibal based on their exchanges with him on social media. Not a cannibal in the emotional vampire way it should be noted, but an actual human flesh gnawer. […]
Essays
When We Talk About Time
Every now and then, perhaps every few weeks, I end up asking how you feel about time. It baffles you, this strange question—it baffles me too. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking you—maybe it’s not that I’m searching for an answer that I cannot find, it’s that I don’t want to be alone in my confusion. It feels as if the past decade, but particularly this year, time has receded in a tide, never to break back on land. I don’t know where I’ve been.
Fiction
Tempting the Pest
‘Push!’ I yell even though it’s just me heaving the long claw of crowbar down into the sand and wedging up the fence from below. The mesh winces, creaks. ‘Push!’ I shout like a midwife birthing new life; here in the long hot flat with the afternoon swelling and the wires ruling long lines of fire. I press what is left of my weight into the bar, heaving as the fence clings on, its thin nails gripping at the soil.
Memoir
In The Beach
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Poetry
Patina on Glass
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