Torsade Literary Space Four-leaf clover (poem)
Four-leaf clover When she’s dead they’ll clothe her False to claim they’d known her In a room of duty saving hours of light Mothballs give a church scent Skirt-clad hips span bench lengths She slips indoors alive Why is it not yet over? Holdouts dare suppose her Likelier than they […]
Adverse Possession (poem)
Adverse Possession Dear cerebral cortex Hors de combat. When we received the news We were saddened and shocked There is not much in the literature One or two articles after long search Found describing therapies Not met with any great success If it won’t offend, or make you feel superstitious (For […]
King’s Rook (poem)
King’s Rook “I’m married to a freak,” she tells him. She talks, and when she talks, her story entrains to a detail that couples to another And while she was only holding a parking space so Artsy could truck some canvasses down The traffic stalls them pulling free, and Rainy talks […]
Nutshell (poem)
Nutshell You know a secret that would crack the nut Yet it’s no secret When the boredom ends when every floor has been swept clean And the doors The gaping holes Allowing other hands to touch the walls, eyes to stare through glass at passersby The doors Can now be closed […]
Where Fashion Sits (poem)
Where Fashion Sits Are you the larval worm in the larder Every feathered pillow has this unseen delver You feel yourself layered in tissue paper Your rat’s race a peristaltic ripple of waxy flesh Your crackling head a pin The glue has brittled in the way of yellowed cellophane The leather […]
Explication (poem)
Explication Morbid feet on a ruminant’s road They are speaking likenesses of nervous rounding More than an anthropologist’s brush off An antelope’s roaming is found to be enough By epoch’s end we have all gone soft And taken to occupy our cushions gravely fanning a white layer of flesh Wise to […]
The patient (poem)
The patient Through the prayers of her family the patient they believed this, they were happy the miracle was theirs and not another’s won her toss, but the trial ended, its second phase never entered over conventional treatments not improved And time short, none to risk She knew all in […]
Forbidden Fruit (poem)
Forbidden Fruit Reincarnate from a molting-pod, as you were a jacket folding into its own hood, a chrysalis peeling an old pied skin then ratchet ratchet like a whalebone corset Worked up from the foot, past the hips Hung by the nervy grip of the brainstem Here you have crown and […]
Now Requesting Action (poem)
Now Requesting Action All places unbelongers unbelong Equally are home, all household words Equal to expression of mundanity Unworldly this household is freeheld Like the angle of a cell constructs a shell Like a marriage of two fiefdoms must Superadd a garment to a crust The foot inside the boot sold […]