First Proof
The first time I saw Jane I was working at the bike shop, a veritable cacophony of grease and gunk I only survived by occupying my hands. Bikes had a purpose that had nothing to do with me—every part fit together properly so my mind could remain free and unviolated. Her left knee was scrapped, with pieces of pavement lodged in the wound. The sight disrupted my hard-earned equilibrium. I tried not to look, but it was too late. I had already imagined retrieving the bits of bloody gravel from her abrasion and rolling them like candy on my tongue.
The first time I saw Jane I was working at the bike shop, a veritable cacophony of grease and gunk I only survived by occupying my hands. Bikes had a purpose that had nothing to do with me—every part fit together properly so my mind could remain free and unviolated. Her left knee was scrapped, with pieces of pavement lodged in the wound. The sight disrupted my hard-earned equilibrium. I tried not to look, but it was too late. I had already imagined retrieving the bits of bloody gravel from her abrasion and rolling them like candy on my tongue.
It must have been during those months when an accident slightly threw off my routine. And maybe it was in those months when I finally found—though I wasn’t looking for it—a brief respite. One day I was at Giovanna’s and she read me a few lines of the subcomandante’s, poetic lines that told the story of a viceroy of India who dreams that his kingdom is destroyed.
Lake Pred was no lake but a precondition, / predecessor assault that kept coming, / preterite arrest we couldn’t quit.
At the appointed time, the team members left their rooms and followed Phillip’s directions. They walked down the hallway and up the stairs to a room at the end of the corridor.
I have just read a diary entry from fifteen years ago, in which I wrote that I had just read some diary entries from many more years before that, written at a time when I was staying by myself in a small town near Caen, in Normandy.
On the cannibalization of black pain and how we free ourselves from it.
And in that dream I felt a warm bright light.
A snow lark hovers over the isolated Isle of the Dead A shadow on the beach is an echo of Venus who bestows upon me some ripened red fruit In this isolated moment waves produce a dream that seduces me
First I was Ren’s guest, a role that indicated only the short length of our acquaintance, rather than what it would become later: the strategic adherence to a balance of formality and intimacy designed to showcase only my most appealing qualities.
Alphabets are limited; it’s the arrangement of letters that produces meaning.
David Berman committed suicide, and I’m like a blackbird that has flown into a bay window and awoken in a flower box, dizzy in gardenia shade, trying to get un-stunned and back on the wing before the neighborhood cats come round.
it’s just writing on instagram: “best decision I ever made / marrying this one” / now no one is afraid to get drinks with “this one” / he’s “safe” because he married a nerd who thinks / she’s a 19th century aristocrat
I like when words fail. It shows we don’t believe / we totally know. Name a plant in a forest // and you think you know it. That name / to a bird or a dog, that sound is a squawk.
A short story from the collection The Dominant Animal.
I am a woman who wakes up hungry. Tom touched only coffee till noon. You do what you’re capable of at some point, so Tom and I left each other.
‘Now here’s one I like!’
Or—‘Stop me if you’ve heard this,’ but
this story’s the exception. It’s
vouched for by Science and actually
happened. You judge.
The cats were entering middle age and felt despair. They had come to realize that life was not a project one could complete successfully. Life was not a treat.
