At first it ached like frostbitten fingers then spread like pollen in the wind and on the wings of bees, then like flames spreading through naive petals. Who can't see the fire conspicuously devouring more than half? Where did it begin, and who is the culprit? Surely not the ones with their heads bowed toward the earth. Answers manifest in threes and fives,

The whir of the wind like a needle in your ear. When the voice of your mother says jump you ask how high a cloud can be and stay within reach. How much more air do you need? With bare toes at the edge of the cliff you consider how long you'll stand looking at the water below before you admit to yourself…

at lunch my father tells me of waxwings— how they flood the bare branches in late winter red-tipped wings drunk on fermented berries flocks tipping the scales between feast and fall— and I think of how we knead and fold, how thin we stretch into brittle sheets until we no longer hold fruit and spill over— a sticky mess on a stained carpet in the color of china glaze nail lacquer…

I buried the tongue my mother gave me in a jar beneath the stairs— it rotted, sweet like mango flesh. She told me words were her fruit to bear, not my seeds to sow. When I was little my father took my hands in his, heavy like rusted anchors. "These are not meant for flight," he whispered. So I clipped each finger,

In a letter I don't send you, I tell you about the way my teeth keep falling out And growing back in my dreams. I tell you that I have never felt despair like When waking toothless and tender-jawed. I tell you that none of this is your fault, but That I hope the executioner comes for you anyway. I crave revenge more than justice.

the morning highway silk or your voice wakes me. i reach for the difference. in a dream i don't tell anyone about, your fingers move deftly over strawberry flavored rolling paper. i ask you to hold it to my lips. listen, and my voice that isn't mine sounds hungry. you can't light it. that's what we are doing here, isn't…

when i was a child i knew a man who worked cleaning oil tanks. he had big, stained palms. he told me about the underside of the world, where nothing looks the way it should anymore. maybe he was already the underside, then. maybe i really was alone down there, like the nightmare where i wake up in the dark,

You, your friends, and I lounge on an abandoned patio. The storefront sign for "B.E.'s Breakfast" decomposes on a brick wall. Call it a porch party—and the party, my friend, is popping. The girly-pops yap, put on a show about the hit new STD clinic that opened around the corner: The Clark. Quickly, discussion of cotton swabs becomes nostalgia for men,

I remembered my home through him, kept its time by his watch, snapshots. The sink overflowed with chipped Christmas china he told us to wash, stank of the damned dog escaping the bath, polishing the floor in gray fur. He was the pipes, groaning at us to keep it down, will ya? We secretly stained the walls with mucus picked from noses while he slept,

The daffodils we brought to make the cottage feel homely and familiar, now stand on the knee-high table in the centre of the impersonal lounge. When I see them, I have a memory of walking into Jane's small terrace house and being dazzled by a spray of daffodils, I don't remember a vase, or the decor of the room – just being stunned by a light reminiscent of picture book images of the pearly gates opening.

Jalan Hang Jebat, Singapore that evening, in the little flat among the black and white terraces, nestled beneath the rain trees, the patience of fasting was pressed into a room. or was it monotony, or drudgery? the impress of time in strained anticipation? the wallowing procession of the hours, and the days? we came bearing boxes and books, containers opening to salad and sourdough,

Where is the feather from the first crow you noticed, black as a mirror of 2 a.m.? What about the sun, so long hidden, that patches of snow remnant the hill? Did you see where my sense of humor went, the old agenda that things would map out eventually into blossom and breeze? What about all I took for granted,

Out of the woods, cross field that never ends, sometimes with ease, following deer tracks or on your knees to a stand of cottonwoods telling the story of rivers long gone. Turn to tangled undergrowth of prairie and blank slate of sky teeming with rain too far away to see, collapsed big bluestem, everything marked by its brokenness or absence.

Sometimes I dream, casually, about the world behind the flamingo-pink door on the gray house I pass on newsprint mornings en route to work. Pink portal to a parlor of pastel light, where anthropomorphic animals sip hibiscus tea from paisley porcelain and listen to pontifications— pointless yet profound, trivial but perchance needed for peace. Pink passage to a presbytery, where prayers…

Alone I drove our children hours to the castled park in Carlisle, halfway home, where teens and waterfowl convene. Their voices calling from arrowslits and timbered battlements salved the jagged edges of division, buttressed the gape on my right side. Their cries and the familiar vowels of the Keystone frontier, aloft in the leeward wind, fanned the embers of mothers' love…

Maybe you're planting the seeds, Geri says when I complain how lately I'm not writing, how the garden lies dormant, a tangle of roots and weeds. In this barren span I feel banished from myself, my mind like an electrical cord searching for a socket, an entry bell buzzing angrily in the dark, no one there to let me in.

rooms filled with fake forsythia and rubber plants, a yard—beat up old cars Dodge Dart, Datsun and orange crates— where else would you sit? A photograph me in black corduroy mini-dress, black tights a run at the thigh, smoking a cigarette. I married my first because he bought me barrettes. I saw you needed them, he said. That was it for me.

Stuck, stuck like a not-yet-dead fly twitching on the gluey strip, stuck like duck feathers in honey, wallowing like a thousand-pound pig on its back, reveling even, in squishy mud. Random words, ideas, float about like drunken boats but soon sink to the bottom. I record nothing, don't want the stress of writing, editing, submitting—rejection stings. And the pleasure of acceptance soon evaporates.

I bought a mattress yesterday from a Tunisian salesman, tall dark and handsome, the usual cliché, and in the process, I got high. How did it happen? I'm not clear. Not on weed. Nor cocaine. What is this? I asked myself as I danced through the store, and eventually out the door. Which mattresses did I buy? Firm, medium firm, extra firm,

Heat rises from damp earth and melts the day It hasn't rained for weeks and the pond is low. Even the cats refuse to go out. Petunias on the deck wilt, grow leggy. The lone alligator, crawls back to the bayou. Only marigolds hold their heads high, little golden buttons like Rapunzel whose hair would also frizz in this heat.

Assorted paint chips hang side by side on our bedroom wall. We've already discarded half the color wheel: red vibrates with aggression—blood, battle, New Orleans whorehouses— green vibes with peace-niks, herbal teas, celadon trees, but also suggests hospital corners. Blue claims calm, but chills like the ocean, and depression churns within perimeters of endless sky. Does mood calibrate to color or color to mood?

I feed the jar and set it on the glass, warm water, flour, steady, patient stir. A hush begins to gather, like church before Mass, and from the depths the waking bubbles purr. A towel tents the mouth and guards the rim. The window fogs where hidden yeasts awake. It smells of apple peel and cellar dim, old spring rehearsing bread in grain to make.

Harry is Timothée Chalamet as Michôd's King1, the sleazy artiste, painter of words before his assembled countrymen. He is the politician seated in the church pew, forehead to interlaced hands reciting the Ave while his phone buzzes with another deal. He is Liu Bei, his manipulation like a slow poison, benevolence on the surface but mistrust beneath, shaking Zhuge's hands like a brother, never admitting his kindness is sharper than Guanyu's blade.

For a flicker I handled the trowel dipped my fingers to their second taper of soil Wriggled an aroma from buds unprepared as I was for Prana's musk come from such diminuent mouths, aporias with tongues Alyssum tocsin light on the neck of my mid- night nurse The vernal moon I awoke with arms full of ice meltwater at my…

You held out a hand you said I had left behind Then, in response to my confusion (I held your gift within two of mine) You scratched my skin with a pin and flaked away its paint. Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. His latest book is Captain's Kismet (Alien Buddha, 2025). Jeremy works in adult education where he teaches communications and explores ways to use AI to reimagine training methods.