in a place where one grass blade makes / the next grass blade’s shade / that grass blade made / the next grass blade’s root

Still, she liked what she had become. She slept in a den of sticks of her own making. Language and its judgment escaped her. Was being animal closer to God than innocence? Her voice was her breath. She was still alive.

This review of zürich moves! 2019, an annual festival for contemporary arts practice in performing arts, was a runner-up in the 2019 Toni Beauchamp Prize for Critical Art Writing, judged by Jessica Lynne.

From the bleachers I watched them / watch you (multiplying, it seemed) / running sprints in heat / across the grass, / standing in for X's and O's.

When she got a paper cut, that speck seemed newly foreboding—she’d lick it off, heart accelerating, as if to let it pool for even a moment would invite some deviously patient menace.

How easy it was, once, to imagine our future children. The blueprints were right in front of us, waiting to be brought to life. We envisioned them, tiny replicas of ourselves, as all couples surely do when they are “trying.”

She says, Maybe I am not, in fact, ill. The ends of all her sentences curve upward into questions. We reduce her medication with a warning: Bipolar I is a lifetime diagnosis, though we concede that perhaps Patient could do with a smaller dosage.

And the cloud that took over the family’s house that Tuesday wasn’t made of your run-of-the-mill water vapor. It was so humid and heavy you could reach out and shake hands with it, and it would grab your hand and shake back.

The arcade I lived in was the cryptograph, more or less. / The dog named Mila demanded evidence of the crowd. / You rented a room in the hotel by the sea.

Frayed hymn, but faded. Unsown / threads turned toothy-tough — a gift / of wild roadside seedheads gone / gunmetal with dirt-freckled rain.

In Iraq I said that word so much, heard it so often. I came home and found myself still saying it. Shrapnel's shell was first used against the Dutch at Surinam (now Guyana). The Dutch were so taken aback by the weapon that they surrendered after only the second time it was fired.

On the ice floe they pretended they were on a white sand beach / The trail guide had really screwed up / Earlier he had pinched a thistle and paid the consequences

But in another language, in my father’s mouth, there is a tenderness to the tone he takes, so that the word beat overlaps with other words, some of them meaning I miss you. He says beat as if the word shares a border with laughter. As if it is just a lost synonym for love.

Vexed light on dune evening primrose. The mineral lands denuded, / this still hurts.

The more I looked at her the more she seemed angry. This was probably because I was breaking into John’s computer again.

The yellow powder blankets my car as thick as the snow that never falls here. For the first time in thirty years, I am allergic. Everyone smokes for comfort and so grows the communal cough.

The retreating autumn deepens in the city. Water turns from silver to maroon. A fisherman smokes on the bank, looking at the rising tide. The dark tones in the landscape are often overlooked. The bank, grey in the fog.

It was six o'clock in the morning when I started collecting clocks, and now it's 9:37. 10:37. I mean it's 10:00cm. These clocks are all wrong. Time is spilling out of them and getting everything. . . getting everything. . . that word when the clothes are on the floor and crumbs are in your bed and you've spilled wine and yelled at George.

I repeat to you, ladies and gentlemen: the State of the Author is strong. And with the unlikely help of every last one of us...

The buildings were rundown and whatever light came from them was like the leftover glow of an all-night party. Tonight, those same lights were electrified, lit up along the grid.

my mother leaning in listening / her usual face her yesterday’s face / out cold on the couch