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As a big surprise for her birthday, I gave in and bought the dog she’d been wanting for a long time. A frisky little caramel-colored dachshund she immediately named Fredo after the weak Corleone brother in The Godfather, her favorite movie. I thought it an odd name but it was her choice and her dog. [...]

In the South, on the nights of a sweltering summer, we children like to sleep in the middle of the road. No cars pass by overnight; everyone plops their water-cooled bamboo beds outside, and the moment of excitement arrives. Ah, the corpse drivers! Ah, the Spider Demon King! Ah, the Milky Way! [...]

His body had been in the trunk some hours already when she began to feel him next to her in the cab as well. She couldn’t see him at first, could only sense he was there. But soon the hair on her right arm stood up and the air beside her began to shimmer. Before she began to see him fully, she whipped her gaze away. [...]

This house isn’t haunted, has never been, but that will change when, some years from now, I will sometimes feel a chill, and sometimes I will feel alone, and sometimes a voice will say, “Who are you and what have you done with Donna?” And I will try to respond, but I won’t know who Donna is, won’t even know a Donna. I fear I might someday learn. [...]

People like to believe they have influence over disasters, catastrophes, losses—by which they mean control—but that’s illusion, and she was done with illusion. Could she write that in her report? You’re all suffering under an illusion. Instead, she picked up the phone and texted: Island//illusion. Illusion//island. They sound the same when you say them enough. There’s a word for that, but I can’t remember it now. I can’t remember anything clearly. All my words are inverted and mirrored. edrorrim. See? [...]

Last night I was certain
[   ]you were there with a gift
light balanced against shadow

fugitives move along fence lines
cities burning[   ]
we’re asked to send money
cities burn
where are the plans
there were no bells, no sirens, no warning[   ]the cities burned
  [...]

Flattened stone floor, covered
in wooden slats, the portico
with columns and even arches,
not exactly the porch
the other house (our same floor
plan doubled into something else)
had across our common grass. [...]

It is not a beautiful day in Mexico City unless you can see Popocatépetl. In this place, beauty is determined solely by whether or not the volcano breaches the nebulous smog like a visitation, by whether the eye can ascend its snow-covered face. When what was sensed but veiled yesterday is suddenly revealed today, it is, in the smallest way, a faith realized.
  [...]

My eyes were already fixed on the face
Of My Lady, and my mind with them—
All other thoughts had been wiped away.

She wasn’t smiling; instead, she began:
“If I were smiling, you’d become
Like Semele when she was turned to ashes, [...]

We were picnicking on the plains
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig. [...]

With floret centers so prolific
they turn—furred caterpillar folds?
zipped mouths? burn marks?—
the quite contrary daisy faces grow
dense in Mary’s garden. [...]

He woke from a dream.

He was in the garage of an old house,
riding one of those toy horses
held to a metal frame by springs.
It was not very fast, not very curious
about the horizon. [...]

I made sandwiches with the bresaola from the antipasto the afternoon before and some of the gouda I'd cut thinner from the cubes. I tried to feed the boy some of the gouda and a little bread, but he wouldn't have any. I suspected it was the traces of vinegar, they clashed with the white bread—it was all we had—or maybe it was just an odd new combination of flavors he didn't understand yet. But what was left over would likely get lost in the refrigerator where things were perpetually being pushed back behind more saved food, this striated order of aging and forgetting—food saved until eating what was left at the far back was unwise. Like memory, the economy of our minds repressing one moment for the next and leaving the past like a set of traps that might go off at any moment. [...]

Maybe the Leather Skulls were no longer the titans of the death metal scene they used to be in the late eighties. Were they titans then? They had a following, a snug cult of enthusiasts. Their admirers were scarcer now, sure, but as they circled the continent on their latest comeback tour in honor of their eleventh album, The Devils He Casteth Out, the band could still fill bars and small ornate theaters with diehards—haggard bikers and their biker wives, with jazzed up hair and fatal shades of lipstick. The concerts were like nostalgia galas, reenactments of the past. One more spin on the crazy train.
  [...]

A trench of barkless trees. Slim black sweater
arched like a claw. Thimbles of the heart and spine
overflown. The halfway trucks, the drivers inside
dislodge wax from their bodies to the tune of a pulverizing
sun streak. Up toward Ohio, geometry for the pupils
to control light. I treat the shoulder as range, [...]

I am the screen of heaven,

homely and undone, strand

by strand, whose

scant beauty emits

glare, distracting from

the absence it

would be, and

desires to become. [...]

On Valentine’s Day, Milo strings a horse-shaped piñata from the ceiling light in our living room, and I walk by twice before noticing it swaying there. The light is off and the horse is dark, but I am not unobservant. Part of me accepts a horse swinging in my periphery. Milo makes up a real reason for me to go back down the hall and, when I look for the space heater, I find the horse hanging. He dangles from a yellow jump rope, and I am so happy to see him in my house. Milo hands me the stick. “You need,” he says, “to kill a horse.”
  [...]

There is the man on the moon. Go to him. Get bread from him, drink his water. Take your dog, Blue to him. Take your mother. She is skiing outside around the house. Stop her, tell her that Blue is going also. Take the gander, Henry. He is short in the legs. Leave me Iris. I have seen her eat feed in a pattern.
  [...]

Marcie decided on Vertigo because she’d recently encountered several texts in quick succession that made extensive reference to it: Chris Marker’s time travel film told in still images, La Jetée, Terry Gilliam’s unlikely Hollywood adaptation, 12 Monkeys, and a story by Bennett Sims called “White Dialogues” about an embittered academic seething in an auditorium during a lecture being given by the hot new thing in Hitchcock studies. The coincidence made her feel involved with the film, and vice versa, in a way that evades more specific description. [...]

We slapped together two clods of oak around a broken bedpan lid and twined them together with a horsetail. Realized then our discovery: the first knife ever. We go to Tony’s. Tony indicates our find—What is that shit?—and he slides us each a prairie fire: whisky, tabasco. Crab says, Maybe lean forward, Tony, and Tony, doing so, discovers the knife sinking in buttery smooth, right between his ribs.
  [...]

Moments lately, I think I am on the brink of an epiphany, swept right to the threshold by, say, the pulp of a grape or the progress of a Beethoven sonata or some other spiritual force, and were I to cross over it, loosed into the light of that knowledge, it would also mean my days on earth are numbered, that I have understood all that is needed before this life meets its resolution. But each time I am held back, caught by the hem of my shirt, denied whatever I thought I might see, allowed it only in periphery.
  [...]

I am sorry for not writing sooner. To be completely frank, I was afraid of receiving a response and knowing for certain that you’re finished with me. I am very troubled by the way we’ve left things.
  [...]

It took place in London at the end of the seventeenth century—a man was spending the evening at home, often thinking of a friend of his, a woman, who was very ill, worrying about her, hoping she would live, when there was a knock on the door, and she entered, looking fine, thriving, in fact, and sat down in a normal way and began a normal conversation, though she seemed a little more serious than usual until he began to cry, at which she continued quietly, discussing things of the soul, aspects of time, and he began to sob, and she continued speaking quietly, as he sobbed and sobbed, and when he finally looked up she was gone. [...]

I’ll just speak for myself. This seems to be the best plan. When you try to speak on behalf of others you run into trouble. See? Already I has become you, but I cannot be you. But you can come along with me, at my side if you like, even if my walk is a bit awkward and you probably want to move more quickly over the terrain. Probably you wouldn’t say “terrain.” You would say ground or path or street. These choices don’t amount to a disagreement, just a different habit of mind. The mind’s terrain. Just now my mind’s terrain is a bit foggy, a bit dreary. It feels, inside of this fog, quite empty, as if, when the fog lifts, there will be nothing but an expanse uninflected by things to see or do, undisturbed by names and places, recollections and glimpses into other times and other places. [...]

A tree stump, leg’s length, scorched black. Dragging slowly through snow sand so as not to take down any of the edges. The grains leave a fine film on the hand. One of several wood pieces to help prop up the broken end of the vessel for repair. I am stranded, marooned, run aground. Struck from the sky by something unseen in the night. How I might attempt to lift the vessel onto the stumps by myself remains to be seen. I have been hauling the dead remains of trees to the site for days. Behind me always, a perfect trail of depressed sand snow snaking into the distance. The wind is merciless so there is no evidence of my circuitous journey. With each step, each push of the log, a gust comes and smooths everything away. [...]

Now that the bumblebees are sounding in the yard, sprint to the garden store in your tank top with your poodle as if there is a headwind. Stub a toe. Hear the tick of the clock as you place your items on the trolley: a new houseplant, two and three: a philodendron since you already have a few and they grow so nicely. Pay for mulch. Get some stones while you’re at it. Some daisies for the back. Black-eyed Susans too. [...]

The boy watches me tend the fry pan. First of November in a warm year. I was an old man this morning. Now it is night and I am still an old man. The good stink of hot fried whitefish rises in the kitchen and oak leaves have fallen, painted the hill red. I am an old man because my body does not move fast. I am an old man because I have seen change that is large enough to fit inside my body. The change I have seen is like a bent stick I have swallowed. It sits inside my chest. It might make a hole in something soon. [...]

Why my mother don’t like me?
     I ask Ansin, my grandmother. I say, How it is my mother never did like me?
     She steups. Kiss she teeth. And smooth-out that news she was reading in. Raise it up again to give it a little flip. At the top. And you could feel the vexness in that flip too.
     I say, Is cause I ent got no father? [...]

“You have fifteen minutes,” the cashier says. Repeats it, runs your card, matter-of-factly smiling like Iowa girls do. Brenda smiled that smile too—pleasant, courteous. No faking, no strain.
     “Any questions?” she asks.
     You poke a carousel rack of baseball caps in front of her register. It creaks a clockwise inch. Stiff-billed, nylon, mesh. Lots of American flags. This one with the cabin patch, stitched with “Home Sweet Home.” It’s a deep bluish plum, a color Brenda likes.
  [...]

The July morning was alive with a sound in the air, strange communications, the acoustics of the big yard amplifying each rustle, each wave. Odd creatures glittering on the ground. Herds spread lavishly, a wilderness of transparent wings, bug eyes, a mosaic of glassy fragments. Glinting. They covered the grass, the sidewalk, covered the branches of the trees. [...]

The sound reverberated in my sense of what was right and reliable in the world like drone weaponry, and what I wanted to ask was: what business have you left undone, and did you do a thing you so regretted that you can’t let go of it, was there a person you cut off, when sympathy would have been the better gesture, was there a person you trod on to get ahead in your sales job, speaking ill of them, so that they were forever harmed, did you say something awful about a friend in school, did you call a friend the worst of names in middle school, because it was a thing they said then, the boys did that, only to find, later on, that you loved that boy in a way . . . . [...]

I do not like old water.

The water in the ocean is old

The lake is old

But maybe it’s not

Subject to the logic of time, of old and new.

Water. [...]

To my beloved sense of security, it’s your perimeter
that draws its corners like a belt when it comes down
to eating frozen foods out of the ground, each unenvelopment a finer slice of skin, hooped up inside     a shuffle to which turns quicken around the other way, like Artaud said about dead bolts, skull-clangor, that rings out. [...]

On my day off, I drove my aging father to his death in the quaint town he had frequented after the navy when he was bouncing between jobs. On the phone, two nights before the fated trip, was the first I had heard him speak of this place. Though I believed him, doubts soon set in, and I wondered whether his claim was a phantom of his condition. [...]

Christmas Night lies bitter cold and silent over the capital, and all life seems frozen. Even the wind is still, and the stars flicker like minuscule fires that strive to keep life going.  [...]

Ariadne struck the mast

Enraged. She     couldn’t sail, no

One had ever bothered to


Teach her, but the ship wouldn’t

Be still.     She had awoken

To find Thesus dead, his crew


Dead,     and at first she had felt

Relief.      [...]

The purged caribou heart. First arctic 
meal prepared raw, before fire. Before fires

purpled meat, meat was ulued off to serve
an open mouth. First heart’s crevasses

stretched like caribou cut raw. Protoheart
raw in search of fire, red windburn revealed [...]

I saw it in this very particular slide of swell’s,
the sylphspun silk of the sylph, she sideways,
her garage is paradise in masque, her sweep
is saturn, szturn im sturm & string, install’d [...]

For breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On slices of rubbery white bread buttered with margarine so that the marmalade slides under the spreading knife. In the glass jar, the orange jelly with bright shavings of orange peel absorbs light and invites hungry eyes. And so, dreaming of marmalade, the brothers, always in need of sustenance, arrive on a snowy March morning at Heathrow. [...]

Because in the kitchen, it’s difficult to lie

Because the yearbook photo shows long straight hair parted down the middle, Marcia Brady-
  style

Because in my son’s mind, he has only one dziadek & babcia & that blindspot diminishes me
  more each day [...]

The earliest, from my brother (June 2007) was twelve seconds long: “Hi, it’s me—aww, fucking-A!—Hi, it’s me, call later, I guess.”

Then the first day of August 2007, twenty seconds: “Hi Amanda, this is Ollie, I just saw the news a bridge fell down in Minneapolis—I hope you weren’t on it. I guess that’s why I’m calling. I’ll try you later. Okay, love you, bye.” I was working at the café when I missed the call. [...]

The road where I lived went in a circle.
Inside the road circle was a circle of grass.
Inside the circle of grass was the matter I looked through
And looked at, waiting for whatever moved in from the edges
And came together in the middle of the circle.
  [...]

heirloom hairline sugar
lips what’s up gas lit
you’re holding the match
dirty mattress book rhythms [...]

No one could remember when the hole appeared. Some thought it had opened overnight—spontaneously, like a weather event or an idea—while everyone was sleeping. Others claimed the hole had always been there, but small and shallow enough that no one noticed it. Only as it widened and deepened over time had it taken shape in the village consciousness. Whatever the case, since the hole emerged at the center of town, where everyone went and everything happened, it became impossible to ignore.
  [...]

Not in a place considered a place. Farther out. On the road nowhere. Where a place had been. There was a smokestack. Not a place on the map. To get there, keep going. Kept going and missed it. Missed it but kept going. There was a water tower not considered a water tower. In a place once considered a place.
  [...]

Truth is asphalt—you, too,
should wait for it to cool,
as slabs of it can and do
get personalityish.
  [...]