“I love roads:”
–from “Roads”
by Edward Thomas

My nomad heart is, of course,
mad for travel, street-mad, made

for movement, Saami blood, Continue reading →

“The unit of wine is the cup.”
–from “In Hell the Units Are the Gallon and the Fuck”
by Anthony Madrid

 
The unit of whine is the cop. Dead, the difference between hiking
and hitchhiking is panoptics. I was a vet, vetted, taken to the border Continue reading →

stood at the end of a long street
and aimed a massive set of fireworks—
I mean, the type of stuff big cities set off
in the U.S.—down the entire path
of the road. What I’m saying is
he was all set to set off the fireworks
horizontal, not aimed at sky, but with
a sort of engineer’s precision Continue reading →

I’d walk home and walk

over those sleeping in
the streets, looking in

at the dentist office
where—swear to God—

a woman slept in a dentist
chair. And then a massage

parlor where I could see
people sleeping on all

of the massage tables. Continue reading →

but they were always going too fast.
I’d read about people having their legs
chopped off. So I didn’t want to risk it. Continue reading →

You wouldn’t have fit in here, either. Riding the train alone again, I stood at a window and watched the landscape. Continue reading →

You said more than you meant to on the edge of Salt Lake City,
where the one-eyed woman panhandled outside our room
and shell casings littered the Salt Flats. You let a lizard run
circles through your fingers. I had never seen someone pick up
the desert. I had never heard distant gunfire. Continue reading →

When I die, trap my soul in a birdcage Continue reading →

My boots slip on the ice and I struggle to stay standing
and think, “This? Is this how I die? On a sidewalk
some idiot neighbor forgot to shovel, taking the dog out for a walk?”
Continue reading →

Crows and starlings scatter at the shotgun crack of the ice
shifting and splintering into blue-gray shards.
There is water running in the falls again, a thin trickle
moving beneath the snow
just enough to break through thoughts of winter. Continue reading →