The dead, they are always descending like mustachioed men in Magritte’s painting, so many bowler hats sailing through a pale blue Belgian sky. Heavy souls—freighted with evil, leaden sorrows, or the insomniac stare of bald regret—crash all night against the stone gates of Hades and stumble, wrecked, along the […]
I never meant it to be permanent: this body-house of wood, this foliating iron lung, these brachia of branched leaves that were my exeunt and leave-taking. I did not intend to remain a tree forever: perhaps for one or two eras of Apollo’s high-octane testosterone, the nymph mania that sparks […]
Kamilah Aisha Moon talks about two poems that she admires so much she wishes she’d written them, including “Love in the Ruins” by Jim Moore and Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Ode to a Drum.”
Kamilah Aisha Moon talks about how she first became interested in poetry and about the first poem she ever wrote.
Heaven hadn’t been invented yet. I stood, or thought I stood, beside my brother, who still clenched the bloody stone as if he full expected the pile of meat and rags to give him further argument. Then I recognized a broken sandal strap, and knew myself the corpse. I’d never seen my […]
He looked like Vincent Price: black suit, pencil mustache, his voice a raven’s croak. If he still loved performing, he kept it secret, blowing his harmonica with his back turned to the audience. He sounded awful, really, and I expected awful. His white hat cast wings of black across his eyes as he slowly […]
Means, liqueur distilled from small, black mascara cherries. Means, cherries preserved in that liqueur. Means, this is going to hurt. Rainiers, Golds, plump Royal Annes are soaked in brine, bleached like bloodstained clothes in calcium chloride and reeking sulfur dioxide until their brightness leaches out and skins are plasticized to snap between the teeth. They […]
Caliber, I couldn’t say, nor make or model, nor how the grip settled snug against the palm— only its ugliness, dark and squat as a poisonous toad. Even Dad didn’t want it; holding it, he wore a look of faint disgust, as if he wished he were wearing gloves—the face of a man collecting […]