Category: Poetry

  • After the Diagnosis

    I stopped planting annuals—no more petunias or geraniums or zinnias I longed to have come back without my bidding. I planted Lenten roses, daffodils, daylilies whose color I forgot so they would surprise me in summer: orange persimmon, showlight, mystic amulet, wispy morn. To continue reading this selection you can purchase Issue 9 http://www.qulitmag.com/shop/

  • SEX ROBOTS COULD MAKE US LONELY AND UNABLE TO FORM RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER HUMANS

    When the dollhouses become our houses, or the other way around, when “no” is a ring around one planet or two or none, when eyes blink in lava lamp light as though in a solar flare, when breathing is more than a chest pumped from remedial paramedics training, when a tantric sojourn to self-enlightenment powers…

  • OCCUPIED

    We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.  Michael Ondaatje I. As in a shootout, bullets crack against brick  or drywall. You hunker where surprised,  cheek pressed to a chair leg, body straining  to disappear into the well of a closet, a desk,  a bathroom stall. The air…

  • NEIGHBORLY

    No more borrowed sugar— you want the mixer, the red costly one that churns my granules, your yolks, my flour into upside-down pineapple envy. You want the oven that heats your hunger to a blister, and an extra Band-aid for your heel hoofing it up our long driveway. You want the refrigerator turning its cold…

  • I’D THINK OF A PRETTY METAPHOR, BUT INSTEAD I THINK I’LL JUST COME OUT AND SAY

    my body is not my body is  my body seven times removed  and hungry, I’ve shed  and absorbed my skeleton 3.7 times  trying to find the perfect shape  for myself and they’ve all been wrong— beauty is Little House on the Prairie  boasting Father could wrap his hands  all the way around Mother’s waist and…

  • I’D THINK OF A PRETTY METAPHOR, BUT INSTEAD I THINK I’LL JUST COME OUT AND SAY

    my body is not my body is  my body seven times removed  and hungry, I’ve shed  and absorbed my skeleton 3.7 times  trying to find the perfect shape  for myself and they’ve all been wrong— beauty is Little House on the Prairie  boasting Father could wrap his hands  all the way around Mother’s waist and…

  • WEED & BINKIES

    Four in the morning. Little bud across the hall is shouting  DA-DA from his crib, static on the Vivaldi in my nearly snuffed dream where a hall of doors open and shut in unison. The subtitles are Arabic, the connection hot-wired from my neighbor’s apartment. Behind my couch the line grows through the wall to…

  • THE SOUND YOU MAKE WHEN YOU LOOK AT ME

    i push play on another scene  from that movie where your skin dissolves like a tablet of powder in the rain there is something about  distance & the heart growing fonder always being the one left behind & never the one leaving i want to  spend a day not thinking about flowers  still waiting to…

  • POST ABORTION QUESTIONNAIRE–POWERED BY SURVEY MONKEY

    after Oliver de la Paz  1. Do you feel reluctant to talk about the subject of abortion? In the center of the ceiling a marigold weeps or perhaps it’s an old chandelier. Inside, there’s an interior glow, shards illuminated in violet-pink  and layers of peeling gold leaf.  Such minds at night unfold. 2. Do you…