The Finch at the Feeder

Making a Molotov cocktail is easy. Remember to tape the top and you're golden--the bottles break without much effort, just like us. Even without experience, you could have a batch in the time it takes to brush your teeth.

Resist this urge. The chuck will feel righteous, but the aftermath will make you an ash--a single ash in an evidence bag full of ashes, the investigators taking you wherever they like.

Instead, paint a still life. The dust-covered oak, the rotten pears, the fruit flies with their buzz. Paint a crack in the bowl that holds it all together. Mute the colors. Step back. The finished product should look like an apology.

Stare at it for a while before you strike the match. When the first corner catches fire, you might smile. Keep staring. The table, the rot, the buzz--it's all yours

and it's almost gone.

Today as a Stick in Bicycle Spokes

I want to throw an icy snowball at a stranger and hit them right in the bridge of their nose. Chew rare meat with my mouth open. Grow thorns and be held. I want isolation in the post-apocalyptic sense. I want to pull a tooth. Today is wrought-iron twisted by the elements into something obscene. Today is a lie you heard years ago and still believe. Today is a cannibal best friend. Gnash, weep, repeat. I am the unapologetic patron saint of the pitiful, the at-the-bar-aloners, the gluggers of good scotch. I am a vandalized zoo. Animals free from their cages, dumbfounded by each others' habitats, lashing out in bewilderment. There is protocol for anger, even rage. Same for jealousy and hate. But when a creature is off-kilter, unsure, thrown out of balance--everything is possible. From the dark grab-bag of instinct and action, there is no anticipating what the hand might come out with.

December 21


She left on the solstice

and ever since, I’ve been exhausted.

I fall asleep at lunch,

head pressed hard and red on the cafeteria

table, hand holding the fork that rests

in the rice pilaf. There is no one

term for my kind of heaviness. I step through afternoons

in a space suit, everyone eyes me

like I am the alien. Where is home?

The quarter-waxing gibbous. The harvest.

The blue. There are still moons I haven’t kissed

her under. Bareness, obviously. The easy metaphor,

the solar system as a sterile womb. When did the night sky

become impenetrable? Storm clouds in mourning, dressed up to grieve.

Loss is never singular. Often, the death of one star is the end

of an entire constellation.