What makes a woman a howling banshee?The one you hear through your bedroom’s locked window at midnight,the tall woman,her body wasted by grief,gray cloak hanging limply on her slumped shoulders,her green dress, once a rich velvet,now covered in wispy silver cobwebs,her dark eyes sunken and red with tears,her pale skin a…

“So I shipped them all over here, every man, woman, and child in the Oompa-Loompa tribe. It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely.” Roald Dahl, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory  The Oompa-Loompa finally free, we litigate because of TV.  Smuggled in luggage breathing…

We keep sipping on crystalware, tumblers coffee mugs,pitchers, kettles – cafésthese days are creative withcrockery. You like blue andgreen colored drinks, I likepale stalks popping out ofmouths of wine bottlessplitting into tiny tendrilsbetween us – the pothos plantthrives on neglect. I keepforgetting to pick one up forthe kitchen, and you areundecided; forget me…

(A response to the novel by Markus Zusak) “Ahead of all parting” weighs 2 pounds, or 48 ounces, or 1360 grams, a single volume by Modern Library, new edition, 1995. Four centimeters short of an A4, thebrobdingnagian book, upon falling by a slip ofthe hand on the streets of Munich, blasts a…

A room sunken now and hollowed out,my bare feet rest on the cool grey clayof your plastered house, as bronzedbodies move in a dance of trowelsin the spaces where you once lived.  I am trying to decipher the peeling blood red fragments of your art, hunting for bull and deer, leg and…

Tell me of your life as I brush the dustfrom your eye sockets, carefully cataloguing your curving limbs. The way your body held itself, even in death. The way your bones dancein the earth, mud-stained,the expression of all your experiences. All you have loved and felt,all you have been, now fallen away. Sing to me softlythe last shreds of your…