zinc words & images

  • Selfie

    Is this me? Hair laid over one eye, Looking, but not looking. Am I Narcissus or The discoverer of a new World? Blue, Brown, cream, pink. The pigmentary fragments Of an image I recognize As a fateful friend I never knew. Adjustments and lighting Obscure and reveal further, Shifting shade and light to be Fragonard,…

  • Filigree

    My heart wants a thing It cannot name. Spreading Among rose bushes and Pushing toward sandstone walls, In a way it is directionless, Yet knows where it goes. Beyond Desire, to be taught by the sky’s Pigment and nurtured by salt Scraped from the ocean’s body. I cannot envision the place it Will come to…

  • The Young Architect

    In the fall, we would make a house and take turns being the mother. There were no walls, only an architect’s plan made of crisp, crepe leaves. Rake. Neat lines. Making sure to leave openings for the door.

  • Der Blauen Kunstler

    When you paint a house on canvas it must be blue, for this is the color of home. The soft robin’s egg edges of motherly relationships, the deep indigo of sleep and dreaming begins at your hand. Reunions, a pale sky of ephemerous greetings and embraces. However wayward the color of distant foothills and city…

  • Musings on a Single Topic #1

    What is left behind? Me You We Paper clips and candy wrappers Friends from high school Friends from college A car, in the parking lot of a bar, when you’ve had too much to drink A CD, a favorite one, in 1998, in your ex’s car Doggie bags full of leftovers A credit card A…

  • Tithing

    the eager man always officiates over the corpses littering the bridal highway lightening his heavenly load burdening the young woman who sees the magazine stand urges herself to abstain from the musical notes pressed so hard against her solarplexus that its breathing becomes her own and the hot sweeping air of its mouth envelopes her…

  • April 24

    Manet’s hand painted the sad flowers of Paris, and I stood in the cool marble of dead British patriots, watching the eyes watch me. When I look into the 2-dimensional soul, I see myself aloof framed in wood paneling. Existing with emotion and absinthe. But questions: how did these women do it? No tampons? Girdles?…

  • April 20

    Your skin spoke to me as a longitudinal study of music, theater, art, politics, strummed against my body and the beat of a fan overhead moving particles of the temperate flow. Cold dampened my toes and fingers until I could not retain my kindled words. The prickles of a ghost were partnered with your eyes…

  • April 16

    Tunnels to brackets, stretched and stained, you took your time with wax and the ground particles that made Nero’s bed sheets blaze with the purple of a million emperors. Consumed with thoughts and threads of saffron, dacron, and human stories, you were inside the navel awaiting helios in ascension and the rendering of new firelight.…

  • April 15

    Your hair illuminated and promising, moved me to believe anything possible. With hands pressed you pushed. Tumbling over, I saw myself tall. Time pours out of your head, but words form and wish for things and know the earth, feel the breeze. Smelling nothing, but your memories, it was pain and fire and burning in…