He wanted to be a prisoner. / Of love. // Of country music.
Tag: art
It’s theirs as much as mine, / this house, their great black wings / sweeping past windows as the day unfolds
(poetry)
After double shifts / waiting tables at the country club, / she soaks herself pruny, / floats on the water until the streetlights hum.
(poetry)
The historical cloth covers two forms / beating like the angels’ hard bodies in the midst of changing time.
(poetry)
Entangled one with another they watch us. / The good died too soon.
(translations)
O, old ocean! the river has mixed with your waters / where I so often bathed
In the weeks and months after the operation, he’d wake from sleep, sounds tooting up from his throat not so much snores as noisy requests for air.
(fiction)
Michelangelo said, / “I saw the angel in the marble / And carved until I set him free.”
(poetry)
Revolution / is the party we throw / at our unhappiness when we discover it / looks like tyranny
(poetry)
“I look up to those people who have nothing at all but their own body, which is used to the core: the rickshaw pullers, the sweepers, the mothers in rags…”
(fiction)
The roof soars so high above the sky’s hanging at arm’s length / And you, dear, are now drunk on a thousand glasses of wine
“Looking up / the wave of your gaze arrived / upon my shore.”
He demands I be a man. What is it to be a man? I ask him.
“In this story, day zero is when I live, and you die.”
(fiction)
“for just a moment I lived / through what they may have felt”
There’s joy on Easter, and that joy lasts a long time. And Lent, it’s not about food, it’s about self-sacrifice, humbling yourself before God. You’re saying, You’re the big guy. I’m the small guy.
You tell me to keep my ass out of the road, and to stay the hell away / from the poison ivy and Virginia creeper because my skin reacts to / everything.
It doesn’t matter which language you speak, because language does not influence your way of thinking.
The Friday after Johnny was caught cutting up his Adderall, the AC unit in the teachers’ lounge broke.
(fiction)
He remains in place next to the stove, watching everyone, observing their flaws.
(fiction)
the cup’s round mouth // gives a satisfying quiver / between the teeth
just a slight breeze, early in the morning / as you lie asleep and the bulb / you planted pushes through the soil
Grigor, as everyone who met him agrees, had been dropped on his head as a baby. Or else nursed on straight vodka.
(fiction)
The rage rolls out of my gut like a stream of regurgitated frogs, leaving me purged and primed for violence.
(nonfiction)
Four poems by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French (Congo-Brazzaville) by Nancy Naomi Carlson
He rejects the idea that Humankind descended from the apes, otherwise why has he, the gorilla, remained at the animal stage?
(poetry)
“wind unravels the light / seeks a face / for the coming storms” (TCTC translations/poetry)
“mixed chalk with oil / twirling brushes / making clouds talk”
(poetry)
I can finally legitimately stroll into a Victoria’s Secret looking for a bra-and-panty set for myself and not pretend to be doing Christmas or birthday shopping for my wife.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 