Category: Photography

Everything Must Go

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She woke before dawn to secure the sign into her yard. “EVERYTHING MUST GO!” it said in large, block letters she had traced from a stencil. “EVERYTHING” was waiting under blanketed tables in the garage, which she trundled out into the driveway as the neighbors’ lights clicked on for the day. She sipped from a thermos of coffee, breathing heavily with the strain of lifting and the uneasiness of letting go.

When folks arrived she greeted them with a smile, saying, “PRICES NEGOTIABLE!” with the same enthusiasm as the sign, as if stenciled. She watched the knickknacks dwindle down throughout the day, tallying each purchase in a ledger. In her heart was another ledger, taking toll in a different way.

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Discovering Venice

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BarI’ve just thrown some spare euros into the receptacle at the mouth of the dock and am waiting impatiently, cleaning off the bottom of my shoe (gum) against a concrete slab that’s holding the ticket dispenser to the earth. But now I’m wondering if it’s even stuck, if I’m even grounded, or the city, for that matter—if we’re all just hovering on top of some idea, some clever thought by refugees. A floating city.

Venice is hot on the Canal Grande, a tiring hot, a boiling tar slick—even the ticket peels out of the dispenser in a slow, calculated way; I can almost hear the machine wheezing. Boats are passing on the canal as my attempt at nonchalance is growing thinner and thinner in the heat. Their dull motors shoot up a light spray of mist that evaporates before it reaches me from my perch, now at the edge of the dock, inside the roofed waterbus stop. The ticket is in my hand, held loosely, as if to show unimportance. I hadn’t once been checked on the vaporetto for any sort of papers, but there are signs posted everywhere in a translatable, warning-sign red: being caught without a ticket would result in a €47 fine. Probably best to play it safe. You didn’t want to be that guy—the guy who can’t even understand the bigliettaio and his syrupy-slow Italian. Just be silent, look straight ahead, and be happy you can pass for a real Italian with your golden skin tone. That’s all it takes.

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Jazz Artist // Summer Monster

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A boy sits playing at the piano, his dark eyes searching for something in the keys.1.

a crossword puzzle undoes itself
mirrors look back and
judge with the sharpness
of unpolished rock
she looks onward
and dries her hair
with the newspaper, expelling
facts onto the bleeding page

2.

a glass of tea
and its ice are oases
on the tongue
and a slow honeycomb drips
tufts of amber rum
while
she advances slowly, thrusting her
wigwam hips and pushing up her pin-
up breasts in the heat
an opera cascades from a window

3.

we roll exposed, leaving behind
silver blades, like knives
lifting our moans from the grass
littering and deflowering
the suburban air

4.

the summer monster advances
toward the bike-riding children
and tears the innocence from
their freckled limbs in delight

The Sunken Place

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_MG_3749

In our bible there is a beginning, one borne from cosmic nothingness—a testament to human creation from the thrusts and dreams of our ancestors. The creation myth we all experience. I remember my birth. It’s here somewhere, swimming around in all this.

How I miss the darkness of before, when we were all noiseless, peaceful things. Free of worry and fingerprints and wrath, protected and fed inside the cocoon of our one, real god.