Author Archives: Salamander Intern

CLICK HERE TO READ

  Not in the goodbye so much itself as in the greeting Of goodbye, the real letting go, as you say (hello) Rests not in the heat of the moment: When one Decompensates—-when one truly loses it—-it is never In … Read More

  I was surprised the mattress shop sold deathbeds, I hadn’t thought of it as a niche, but when I lay down upon it— Swan’s down, classical ticking, wire coiled and wrapped in ash— I felt so at home and … Read More

You drank in the King of Prussia most nights, aging just as you’d intended—surreptitiously, with wrinkles in your lungs. And you still wore that red ribbon round your neck— kittenish, a dare. You sang when it suited— your voice a … Read More

  When it hurled itself against the spinning wheel of a car we hid our eyes, but the crippled pigeon lived and alighted at the curb’s gray foot, looking up. Tires roaring behind rumpled its feathers. You wanted to leave … Read More

(La Gitana, Louis Kronberg)         Not the gardenia-painted comb    in the crown of her slick black hair nor the curves of her shawl, its rosebuds swirling, like Spanish dancers, not even the little curl defining her cheekbone, … Read More

  When I telephone my erstwhile inamorata she speaks in the voice of minestrone. Not the minestrone her mother would make having stood the entire morning in a small windowless kitchen throwing diced vegetables into a pot whilst intoning Giacomo … Read More

  The day’s rind grated down to bitter pith you order what the menu calls a seasoned mix of tubes and tentacles. It arrives sheened with something like what condenses on the outside of the glass. Your forehead sheened with … Read More

  I am in the room of my marriage, when I had one. Like a memory of a dead long gone ancestor, Everything is polished with a certain conceit. As if simply by passing, time became right. I can see … Read More

  Three tickets left, she pulls herself into the monster truck, rearing on hind wheels, buckles herself into the driver’s seat, stiff-arms the wheel. No one snaps her picture, one more flash in pulsing neon. Daddy has dissolved into the … Read More

  He sensed his ear, but he could not see it. In the blind this is called blindsight. The last failed effort of the body to survive— Keep this object carefully. The ear rested on the table alone among blue … Read More

  Detached from everything but the fluorescent flatlands where bitchy angels rule the morphine drip and gauge the numbers in broken verticals like a child’s rain— I was stroking her forehead when up up she came swimming hard eyelids fluttering … Read More