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Whenever you arrive anywhere,
open the car door, stretch your arms, andsample the air. Touch the keys of pianos
you do not own. Touch velvet. Touch silk.Close your eyes and turn toward the sun.
Read it in Roi Fainéant Press
And a note for readers: I’m taking some time off. A Quiet Root will be back in May.
There was a pile of swords and nunchucks sitting on the curb by a house in my neighborhood. There was a sign by the pile that said, “Free Ninja Stuff”. I was staring at the sign when a woman yelled down from her porch.
“Please take all of Larry’s ninja shit,” she said. “Please, please, please.”
“Did Larry quit ninjaing?” I asked.
I’d quit ninjaing a few months before and had been adrift and unhappy ever since. My gums wouldn’t stop bleeding and I’d gained 15 pounds, mostly from eating Oreos.
“Larry didn’t quit ninjaing,” the woman told me, “I quit Larry.”
Read it in Pithead Chapel
I will see you in June, when chives sprout
over the mountain top. You will feed me berries
and we will peel foam from the underside
of mushrooms. You will then be
somewhere behind me running furiously.
Read it in Sundog Lit
I slip between the crevices
of his fingertips. Pieces of
me lodged in the hook of him.
A pearl in his palm. Your father’s
Read it in Atlas and Alice (PDF)
Rita’s got one eye on her toddler and the other on her order screen when the landlord calls with his usual morning-after bitch-fest about late-night parties and neighbor complaints.
Read it in BULL
You have a recurring dream where you are wandering in a city, naked, and encounter a wheeled rack of hand-painted denim shorts. The only ones big enough to fit over your hips are hideous. A wolf is painted on the crotch, with a red, lolling tongue. Nonetheless you wear them. Only then, you see that they are signed by the artist, and the artist is Noah Kaplan, your novelist ex-boyfriend.
Your friend Judith, who is a therapist and always records her dreams, thinks this nightmare is hilarious.
Read it in Monkeybicycle
but you
have always been a little different, your cheeks
bigger than heartbeats,your heart
a harvest moon wide across skies.Your mom and I just drove you three hours
to move you into a dorm room—away from us
Read it in The Good Life Review
what gets my mother most about dogs is the panting, language
she’s certain means hunger, ravenous threat. she prides herself as an expert;
back home in Beijing she, unlike a dog, had never been called a good girl
just a hungry one gorging herself on cabbage and mantou from the canteen.
Read it in Shenandoah
translated from the Dutch by Judith Wilkinson
Does hope bypass the sombre houses?
By what light does it find the door
of those who can’t wait for it any longer,
now that the hasty evening demands haste,
the night keeps reminding us of
unsettled scores? Might as well
start without hope.
Read it in Anthropocene
She sends me letters in the dead of night,
when the house could be leagues underwater.
This is the way it’s supposed to be, she writes,
this is the way you’re supposed to feel.
Read it in Okay Donkey
A Quiet Root 