Torsade Literary Space 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 […]
Charity (poem)
Charity The camp takes all the rising ground On the delta’s city side Driftwood split, stakes driven in and roped paper and cloth of every color, every kind partition quarters curtain sleepers Hard-faced pounding builders making use of time New shelters in construction catching wind like kites Fortress blocks dragged up […]
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 […]
Field Marks (poem)
Field Marks What makes the clannist rich though he cries poor He never chooses his pleasures but enjoys them all His lustful wish is to be begged for help And refuse it She hears a crunch of shoes, a tuneless tune A male whistle. Those things, like coughs, can be […]
The Folly: Llewellyn at Home (poem)
Readers, I’ve been going through what seems a touch of covid, and not getting much work done (I feel pretty well overall, though, no worries). Here’s an episode from The Folly, worth a reissue. The Folly Battle Stations Llewellyn at Home Colonel Llewellyn keeps visitors to Chequerstone, […]
Wrong Again (poem)
Wrong Again This was better, more sensitive. But so much silence in his conversation-mate Must be a warning. “I’ve learned not to apologize.” He thought, Why me? A line of inquiry that promised to go badly. “You’ve learned not to apologize,” she said. The topic seemed to want a change of […]