Her Eyes Her eyes hang like plums. New iris stems, green, the blue sepal folds, falling. I want to dice them with knives, plunge blades to the metal core where molten iron forms magnets, lodestone moon, birthing inconstant love without crowning, salamander words, speaking in tongues. Salt fleck seeds suckled. The storm on my lip, bursts open brings eyes to bloom. “Look!” See me from within beneath the blue fur coat that holds everything. But her eyes hang from vines accuse ...

Her Eyes Her eyes hang like ruby tomatoes sweet, caustic fruit dripping red from fertile earth. I want to dice them with knives, plunge blades to the metal core where molten iron forms magnets like lodestone moon, bearing inconstant as love or inexact as science. I scatter salt flecks like seeds. The storm on my lips brings them to bloom. “Look!” See me from within beneath the blue fur coat that holds everything. But her eyes hang from vines accuse the passing clouds of false witn...

Guernica Herman writes a letter from an open-air café in the Basque town that bears her name. Her parents, Jim and Carol, were both art students when they met at a Picasso exhibition in New York City in 1981. Two years later, they christened baby Gee in a small Lutheran chapel down on Dundas Street; witnessed by a small crowd of friends and family, and the usual assortment of well-wishers willing to suffer a cold, wet Lake Ontario squall in November. There, under the glory of God, and ...

A grey rainbow trout fell from the sky, the day John left the office for the last time. It was a healthy five pounder who’d spent the better part of three years in nearby Windy Lake, avoiding the cheap plastic lures fishermen put out on Sundays, only to be whisked up this morning by a water spout. After shattering a fortieth floor window of the Providence Insurance Building, the fish tumbled down the sloped glass incline, glancing off the umbrella of a hot dog vendor, before flopping at...

I nuzzle small, metered lines, gnaw slippered poetic feet my head laid low to the Persian rug where skirt folds end in hardwood, engrained with year after year of failure. Her voice full with love and disappointment she runs fingers along the back of my ears, soothing me until I sleep from the unbearable weight of words. At night we dream the same things: bones, dug up or buried while she twists her bed sheets, cries for freedom I desire no escape from my mistress, bound and tied to strings o...

Her green eyes mirror the lime and olive of the Pyrennes brown curls loosened, tease the dip in her shoulders and her thin-smile tattoos wordless thoughts, indelible roja. We met on the Ruta del Ferro in the cool of the abandoned rail station where lavender breezes carry ghost trains east. Beneath grey monastery walls that call out the dead and the hot clay rooftops of this medieval town, she rises from a clam-shell basin, afloat on a sea of poppies. Made up with her best hopes and dreams she...

If you strain your ear hard enough to the heavens and wait for that moment when the wind dies down and traffic stops, you can hear the sound of the universe dying. Not a moan like a dog's whimper or a groan like a man sucking out his last breath, the sound of the dying universe is a perfect b-flat note. Playing for twenty billion years, I often imagine that celestial note hanging like the reverberations of a piano gasping out Chopin's Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor, Op. 35. Though it brings me ...

Guernica Herman writes a letter from an open-air café in the Basque town that bears her name. Her parents, both art students, met at a Picasso exhibition in New York City in 1981. Two years later, they christened baby G. in a small Lutheran chapel on Dundas Street, where she wailed out her staccato protests and managed to hit every high note of "Oh Holy Spirit, enter in." Since childhood she'd identified herself only by the letter G., as a way to deny her infamous name. From the café, smoke ...

Here, background sun washes out the right corner next to old wrinkled tape holding the faded family photo to crinkled black matt paper. My brother fills the scene somehow larger with time and my sisters stand close framing my smiling parents within a perfect triangle. I hide there, a mere shadow indistinct at eight next to the mortar seawall and the twisted cedar branches lost within the family fold. I am shirtless, tanned brown from a red Pacific sun but my white shorts glow bleached as dry ...

Although her name tag read JANE she was anything but plain. Standing in the checkout line of Talbot's Drug Store I stared at her through the dusty lenses of my wire-rimmed glasses. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I picked at dirt and grass stains on my open palm as I waited. Occasionally, I peered ahead to count the people in front of me. Twelve. Seven. Five. A tall bald-headed man wearing a Cutting Crew t-shirt blocked my view, but when I peered around him, there she was – ...