the beach in december

palm

cold sand

erased stairs

under the pier

toes

man fishing

horizon

sand

crab legs

spiral

treasures

bird

*

happy belated winter solstice to all. 

blackout

the pitkin review fall 2013 issue website is up.

get a sneak peek of the contents, & my design work.

playing around a bit with illustrator...

"The scent of spikenard
is nice. It smells of
weird responsibility."

-Mary Ruefle, Spikenard. 

"New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds."

-John Cage

a poem

roaches

I love cockroaches

the way they breathe

through their skin

if you submerge them

in water they hang limp—

a simulation of death

but once they dry out

their antennae twitch

& they sprint into the dark.

I am saturated— 

all my orifices shut 

laying in stasis

entombed like sewage 

I wait for the sun

to dry my flesh

excerpt from my annotation on mary ruefle.

"The world is wide & black stretching out before you… like falling asleep in a far-away field & waking up at midnight to see nothing but statuesque darkness in every direction. The time I was swept off the rocks at the beach by what my mother called a “sneaker wave” & almost drown in less than three feet of water because my brain couldn’t register which direction was up. 

I keep thinking of it as ash. The moments after the volcanic eruption in which all the noise has stopped, & the ash wafts down like blurry snow. I’ve never been in a volcanic eruption, but I’ve seen pictures: my mother standing in her prom dress on the front lawn—the sky grey above her."

-nr