ISSUE V

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

If it helps, I think of home like a lockjawed bull—

sunbaked teeth a dense membrane, hesitating. Heat

hallucinating outwards through the rolling moraines

and turning sonnet into boneyard in his mouth. 

I pray the cool and wicked lines of hunger's Sutra

and clean the desert with my skinny lip. If it helps,

I go to presence with an un-presence. I think 

stillness is called paying attention, then I stick myself

in places I don’t know. Some neoteric Cinderella,

I crown from my mother realistically with ease, but 

it’s easier to imagine myself laboring out, 

my wet head like the night black hole of a minnow egg.

Here I am at the bottom of the stairs again, Mom, 

in debt from all these shoes and going hungry, on my knees.

But whatever. The lights are on and nobody’s

home. So sad. Game over. Party over. Scurry

home.