my father showed me how a piano could cleave a room like a fault line, how a dance could keep you deathless: the eighty-eight teeth in a piano’s mouth chewing up   strips of sheet music like so many pieces of bubblegum. my father had pounded his fingers into skeleton keys and molded their locks […]

Lift the machine above my head the sky into silver grids, a handful of elastic breath and feathers. Purr like my breath at night whirring. They meant for it to be like this.   We sleep in tangled fluorescent light sharing the crook of your arm. We sleep with wax running down your face in […]

Arina Petrova is a hypothesis. She is stardust. Melted chocolate. She dances on the dark side of the moon. She is a monster, a dragon, A story to scare, To inspire. She bathes in fire, forged From an erupting volcano On Jupiter. Maybe, she should be admired, Taken to a photo booth and savored for […]

tonight the streets are swamped in blue. it settles on our skin, delicate, and feather light— (i don’t believe in a higher power but god, this is divine) the only noise audible is the soft intake and exhalation of air.   our language is one of motion: you don’t say anything but i can hear […]

A lodger of mysterious trade has inhabited the attic in my head.   He plays swing music on tuesday evenings and waltzes, just to wake the dead.   A man of rigorous, decorous, satin grace; he deposits leaves in library books.   He visits the woman in apartment 42, who keeps my scarves, and dreams […]

ultrarealism There is a tall, straight vase on the table full of yellow-topped orange tulips. Two are tall, but one of those is bent over the edge of the vase, dwarfing itself. Three stand at medium height together, with a small one tucked around the back, and another, still smaller, in the very middle. Rennie […]

Picture a balloon, inflated to translucence. There are a number of ways in which this particular predicament can end.   a)           Pinched by the neck, stretched, such that                it screams hilariously until it dies,                out of noise.   b)           Let go, to fly […]

I want to ‘pick’ out a wardrobe with someone, anyone who will take me and all my bow ties and pairs of worn-out sweatpants.   Mahogany sunshine sounds like a  spirit to me, or the final high that  him and I can try once and  forget like all the times we were grounded.   Brass doorknobs we can turn, […]

Sitting on the couch with you, I tell you I want to go inside your brain   and dance. Maybe the pink twists and turns look like a race track, circles and switchbacks   and Mario Kart characters like the ones we drive around Peach Gardens in little go karts   but now, I’ll get […]

By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it. – Eliezer Yudkowsky   Warped, I wore titanium where, my fallacious tin ribs, enclosed a feather-weight heart. The start –   I slept silhouetting flames in the night-sky, called stars. Next, rummaged in garbage bins, fell in lust […]

Rain made the spiral houses part away from each other on gelatinous railways. A town disbanded.   They migrated across the pavement with staircases on their backs.   Slugging through pools of their own body, their Golden Ratios were crushed by feet from above.   Living-rooms flooded in downpour, a tear-drop apocalypse. Fibonacci caved in. […]

With death comes rebirth, and like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet. – Spoken by Allen Ginsberg in the film Kill Your Darlings   Wrap me in your 20 bar concerto, o wondrous one, o being fuelled by musky nights and caffeine and nicotine and smoked lips.   Nitrous, oxidised, trip through sliced […]

Plate your pain with reinforced steel; fit it with tire treads and arm it with the revolver you keep in the kitchen cabinet next to the Coco Pops. Exhibit your pride; curate it like a museum display. Soak the constitution in formaldehyde that sticks the imperatives to the page. Program the X-ray machine at the […]

North Someone re-threads a fishing rod by torchlight then re-beads the line with Ugie droplets. Later he reels in floundering silver– wraps it in newspaper then walks homewards.   East Waves crack their knuckles on shadowed sea-walls and suck their teeth through rust-ribbed lobsterpots. At the sailing club, sails dry into the night. A woman […]