Mile Marker of the Self
The nature of his drift was velvet and terminal;
he was easy to miss,
like a low star in daylight over Kansas.
September, sleepless, prairie-flat:
motel curtains swayed,
cheap wine in dented thermoses breathed cork-less.
Radio hosts hushed mid-sentence.
Billboards blinked and forgot.
Mouthful of stardust,
hair half a century windblown—who drove him.
With what.
Make a fist for soul. That is the size of it.
Also directives from our dust.
He buzzed down.
A dashboard clock
ticking its last,
the sound of time curled under the hood
like a wounded animal.
That same September,
his joy molted in every brittle Polaroid tint,
fluttering
to the next broken diner booth
and the next, toward west,
Nevada-bound.
It was when jackrabbits were the only things
crossing Highway 50 at dusk.
In the old part of himself labeled “Childhood,”
most of the ghosts were probably still asleep
while he passed through.
Though there were (they swore)
no more gas stations this far out,
one glowed still-bound in
the drawer of his ribs,
under maps of regret and ignition,
lit dimly
by the swing from the mirror
where his ex-lover’s dreamcatcher dangled,
beaded and torn—
as one sardine left upright
in its brine and time.
This is the extent of that.
I still have plenty of road.
I’ve seen angels
scribble their names on receipts
in gas stations at 3 a.m.
more times than I’ll ever tell.
Unnamed Need
I feel, just this very instant,
for the unwritten poem—
the one I abandon on Lenox Avenue
each time I try to name the genre
that might hold me.
A sonnet? A confession?
A braided essay with citations and ache?
I shelved it all once—after workshop,
wrist sore at the crook
from carrying a basket
of borrowed forms.
The glossy metaphors!
Pear, lychee, plum—
forbidden fruits plucked
from MFA syllabi,
sweet with approval
and rot.
Once, a draft spilled itself
in white sperm whale ellipses
across my desktop,
while I searched for the line
that could carry
what no journal would touch.
It was Brooklyn. My thirties.
Everyone I knew was negotiating
the same desolate luxury—
knowing the price of art,
and who pays it.
We were all ashamed of the same things:
authenticity. marketability.
the terrible burden
of being a “voice.”
I’d lug my manuscript home,
counting rejections like receipts,
doing grant-math
in a spreadsheet’s margins,
telling myself it’s okay—
that the lyric still counts
if it bleeds
into prose.
I’d squint into it, or close my eyes
and let it slap me in the face—
the known world ending
in a blur of genre tags:
Ethnic. Experimental. Diaspora. Grief.
Filed like flavors
in a sampler box:
marked,
but never devoured.A need I can’t name—
not for Eden,
but for the page
before the fall:
before the first “no,”
before the hyphen,
before I learned
what not to say
to be published.
Morning After
Each morning we begin. My wife
shoves me alive. There is no bed,
only the warmth of stone, softened by ash.
She speaks in half-language—half-gesture, half-grunt.
Sometimes I miss English. Mostly, I miss
the silence that used to follow it.
On the walls, she’s painted the zodiac—
charcoal signs smudged into broken concrete:
Pisces swimming backward, Leo just a jaw.
She repaints Scorpio daily. Says it’s the only one
she still trusts.
I don’t have the heart to tell her
I was born under Libra.
We treat these signs like prayers
but can’t recall what they meant.
We are past meaning. Past calendar.
We count days by how long it takes
for the birds to return.
She leads me outside
to a basin we fashioned from gutter-metal.
We wash what we can. The rest,
we leave to the wind and morning’s mercy.
There is still coffee, somehow.
Still jerky. Still breath.
Grace, I think, is not divine.
It’s the stubborn refusal to die with your mouth shut.
I’ve never seen her face the same way twice.
She changes with the sun,
like a dream trying to hold form.
She sings while stirring soup.
Her voice forgets itself, becomes something
older than melody—like the sighs of cattle
before Moses came down the mountain
to find them dancing round the golden calf.
God, how quickly we shape idols.
How fast we melt our memories
into forms we can beg for favor.
The calf gleamed once.
So did civilization.
We saw what happened to both.
Yahweh came to me once,
in the form of a red bird
with a broken wing.
It circled twice above my head, then vanished into smoke.
No voice. No thunder.
Only feathers and the weight of being chosen.
Now, every bird
makes me ache with recognition.
But none speak.None carry commandments
or warn of floods.
This world ended without water.
No ark. No dove.
Only forgetting.
The oceans thickened into tar.
The trees leaves whispered fire.
Clouds turned black, then left us.
No one knew the form it would take—
but all of us prepared in our own way.
Our neighbor dug bunkers,
stored tins, drew maps.
He died reciting Psalm 90
with his face pressed to the dirt.
We buried him in plastic
and named him Moses
because he died
carrying too much hope.
Now we are Adam and Eve,
though no Eden waits.
The earth has already tasted
knowledge and rot.
There is no serpent.
Only dust, birds, and one another.
No one envies the agony
of holding the future in your loins.
We touch because we must.
Because extinction is a heavy silence
and we are still, somehow,
the echo.
This morning the world’s white face
reminds us: death comes softly,
like snow on rusted out cars.
The birds line the fence—
silent, reverent,
as if waiting for a different miracle.
I fill the feeders
and return to her.
She places a hand on my shoulder
and says nothing.The birds bow. Then feed.
Still, I watch the sky
for the red one—
for flame,
for breath,
for God.
But the sky remains empty,
except for the morning,
which comes again,
like a bad miracle,
and calls itself hope.
