noise & silence: 5 Prose Poems in Blazevox/Spring 2017

5 Prose Poems

from the manuscript

How the World was Made

currently in the Spring 2017 issue of

Day of the Dead

Sage-smoke weaves around yellow leaves, wraps a bare, black trunk. I hear the continual heat-crack of hollow stems. You appear out of the smoke, stand there, mute. I want to return to that dim-lit kitchen again, watch your arthritic hands knead dough, flour-dust across your apron, while you tell your stories. (But this is not you as I once knew you. This is you as you are now: half-smoke, vague guide, weaving something new).

Years after your death I found some of your notes in the yellowing margins of your copy of Labyrinth of Solitude. Incomprehensible scrawl, written after you were more than half-blind. I thought: odd, so uncharacteristic, to be reading that book. What did I know about you? I thought: if I can decipher those words, I would have the key, some key, some important key. “Why were you reading Octavio Paz?” I say into the smoke. (But this is not you as I once knew you. This is you as you are now: half-smoke, half-guide, weaving something new).

Please tell me a story tonight. I will follow you as you ride the flying elm leaves out in the street, wherever they lead…

You can find the rest at Blazevox

here.

Or this:

The Crow Tree

The city crows have been using the ash tree in front of my apartment as their roost for the last week and a half. There’s nothing stranger than a bare tree full of crows. I find it oddly comforting, though, waking up late at night, and hearing them rustle together, dreaming their crow dreams: pizza scraps and road kill, the chanting of flies.

Some think that a tree full of crows is a bad sign, a dark omen. The last time I lived near a crow-tree I was working in a dish room with boys on loan from a school work program and sad women on subsidized half wages from a home for the mentally disabled…

You can find the rest at Blazevox

here.