I’m so sorry. We didall we could. Another mothermight cut off all her hair. I grow mine longand longer. When I lean forward,it cups my face like a lover’s hands.I’m in St. Francis’s cave praying on my kneesin the dark: tell me what to do.I am nine again under the dining room table,peering out through a wall of laceat my father’s high black shoe.He never told us what he did in France,if he killed anyone. He had thick wavy hairlike my son’s. Mine’s poker …
My son returned a month after the funeral. He was sleeping sweetly in his bed. I wanted to wake him right away. I wanted to shake him gently and to hold him against my body, while telling him how much I had missed him and loved him. But I didn’t dare. What if he were actually dead, again? What if he vanished the second I touched him? I sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the crown of his head, where his hair swirled, at the backs of his stick-out ears, at the nape of his neck. The covers …
Pulled from the Anacostia,a remora hitched to the Potomac,Sligo Creek draws its stomach away from the sculpted cageof its ribs, dupe for the trickle-downof everyone else’s appetite, loosening and tightening its beltone single, seasoned notch at a time.Withstanding the wash, neck outstretched, the turtle is engravedlike a cave wall, filled with the fleshof adaptation. We have come from where we have replaced the birdswith sun-phantoms, their woven poucheswith semaphores dripping from …
Giving intocircumstancewe find ourselveslike chains we clasptogether hurrying thislanguage in our limbs ourlips our fragile nerves in paleattempt to cross the expanse wehave failed here to define not surehow much a question of such magnitudewould cast a shadow over this our tender momentyou pause and shift sculpting the silence like a tunnelI count the line breaks as you breathe and let the questionweave into the nest we’ve made letting it go unanswered nothing isbetween us but thin sheeted …
David Felix is a youthful septuagenarian English visual poet who lives in Denmark. For more than half a century his writing has taken on a variety of forms, in collage, three dimensions, in galleries, anthologies, festival performances, video and in over sixty publications worldwide, both in print and online. Born into a family of artists, magicians and tailors, he was raised on oil paint, sleight of hand and Singer sewing machines. …
In the summer between my MFA and PhD, I housesat for a professorial couple from my graduate program in New Mexico. They had a beautiful house: nothing outrageous, just a nice two-bedroom-one-bathroom with a backyard. I loved it. The floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room overlooked the mountains and lavender in the front yard. Those were the two things I had always wanted in a house: French windows with a view and lavender in the garden. In their house I lived a perfect life. I woke up …