The body really is a temple
and it makes a lot of noise when it moves


Sofya Mirvis, Where Am I, 2008


This World Is Not My Home
-- by Klipschutz

The newest thing in movie adaptations,
the commentator commentated
one room away, is Borges!
I had the water running.
He commentated on:
Monopoly & Risk
are in the works.

Does anyone
remember
Clue?

Released
back in
’06.

I always have the water running
and hear everything wrong.

The Parker Brothers never miss a trick.

*

Back to the news: A South Carolina politician
has been crying in Argentina for
five days.

Deep South enough for you?
His wife has had it.

*

Monopoly, Risk & Borges, my attorneys.
They eat what they kill, though
at times they eat it first.

Borges, like injustice, is blind.

The other two? Their marks of Cain?
Less overt, but far, far more
pronounced.


Before She Was Born
-- by Deborah Ager

Not yet a silver sin — all lanugo, vernix sheen, sheer skin slough.
Not yet called forth to map a vague path home.
She was a green cloud fomenting, roads filled with boiling blood.
She was enough to spook houses that woke to apples and a spark of sun —
Enough to tap the whirring, purring feline from a nap
on the glowering abdomen. I rattled. She roused to water,
that slurry, that grey pool. Raised a dot of fist to suck a thumb.
What held sway beyond that beyond.


Sterile
-- by Ash Bowen

Your sister can’t stop hurting when she sees children
laughing. They coil in her dreams, knees raised
to their stomachs, feet stamping their rhythms.

She’s reminded of high school, how she pulled up
her dress in loneliness and a man laughed at her.
But never mind that. Her husband has his gun

collection out. He can’t stop pointing and clicking
the trigger at the open window. But the birds
won’t die. They flutter away, startled by the pitch

of his voice. They land on the fence
of the city swimming pool. There the children run
off the diving board, ducking invisible bullets.


-- back Monday