Tres recuerdos en verso I. The Legendary Children we are all snakes devouring and being devoured by those who remind us we are human II. Apsis there is no perigee where we’re standing but if there is such a thing as witchcraft, use it now before I leave without saying your … Continue reading
It all started when dad made me sign up for football. I was really little, and when I told him I didn’t want to, he said, “It will turn you into the man you’re going to become,” and we didn’t say anything else for the rest of the car ride. And, looking back on it, I guess he was right, but not for the reasons he thought. Continue reading
Womb In my dream, it had green eyes and light-brown skin. I couldn’t make out a gender, and none of the doctors in the white room I stood in spoke of one. It looked up at me with those big green eyes, almost reptilian. I was terrified. It was mine, I was sure, but its … Continue reading
I remember childhood as the dirt on my feet and how my gold anklets jingled when I ran across the street. The red strings tied around my wrists, the first apartment we grew up in. Summers full of bug bites and melted ice cream. Sleeping parents and car alarms. I want to give that to someone. Continue reading
He asks if the roar of the engine is loud and I want to say like the belly of a slouching beast, because it’s not all false, but instead I say how close we come to the sun. His hand spans my back in slow circles, and he tells me again to open it. And I say, I tried, it wasn’t a success.
Kissing him, there’s an urgency, and the feeling that if I don’t leave the house now, it’ll burn down around us.
Continue reading
Dante come to life
in ripped thumbnail blood fresh from a circuit
around the lightless insides of my skin
at six quarts a minute; mostly all me
and a bit of something not very nice.
Continue reading
In touching we opened a door we could not close and did not want to. I said sleep in my bed
but I meant tonight not every night still there she was every night I just kept sinking to the bottom like a stone
Continue reading
If ever there came a moment you wanted someone to tell you to stay, to unpack, to quash any lingering doubts, it is now. But of course these moments only happen in films, the earnest entreaties sputtered out over a sorrowful score. You anticipate his response in that dramatized scenario: “I don’t want that kind of power over anyone else.” Continue reading
But in September, when all the tourists have left town, the beach at night exudes the shuddery, gut-strung pleasure of abandoned space.
Not that it’s entirely deserted. Down here we loiter with intent.
Continue reading
i know you would like that:
alien sand packed thick in my throat
or salt sucking the teeth out my mouth.
don’t matter, huh? you just want me undone,
any one of nature’s big legged rickshaw pullers
can get the glory of dragging my undersong through to silent finish.
Continue reading
The James Franco Review 