walt whitman

crayon pirate

"there was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. what does it mean? i said. a pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said & then he pulled his eye patch down & turned and sailed away."
- brian andreas

lewis carroll

"if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."

shirin neshat

alone, drinking with the tickfaw river

featherweight lawn chair, cooler for a footrest,
and me a squatter on the landlord's dock
where bait stealers teased a thousand times a day
until rowdy boats and summer scared them deep.
day and night i snoozed on the porch
beneath a filthy orbit of fan blades
to the opera of my neighbors fighting
and reconciling in the glow of stolen wattage.

i saw them swimming once. maybe naked,
judging from their skittish talk, but the water
smeared their bodies' pale particulars.
it was just me and the tickfaw river.
me with the taste of a tin can in my mouth,
feeling no pain, lighting a cigarette backwards,
the tickfaw tricking me closer and closer
with echoes and music out of nowhere.

is it funny that i was too lit to notice
twenty-five orange yards of extension cord
stretching from my outlet, over the driveway shells,
to feed the hungry plug of their deep freezer?
mother would have pitched a fit if she discovered
the stash of whiskey in the woodpile,
and my father wasn't laughing
if he looked down from his company of stars.

- alison pelegrin