Tag Archives: Len Kuntz

as for the angels, they were nowhere near the pool that day, hijacked as they must have been by some other hedonist who didn’t know my child, just turned two, or how his still-chubby arms would have jackhammered as he … Continue reading →

Stevie Nicks won’t stop barking as the swallows swarm my window frantic for a nest I don’t have today the lake is a hollow jug bone dry and down on its fortune out of step with the times some kind … Continue reading →

I tell the therapist I’m broken not busted but he just smirks like a toppled tombstone or the death valley sun I unpack my duffel toss my dirty underwear on the floor but he just smirks like a taxidermied lament … Continue reading →

for Bailey and Chase When my son tells me his best friend has overdosed and that my son was the one who found him, blue and wood-stiff on the bedroom floor, there’s too much rain, rain hammering on the sill, … Continue reading →

   (after Merle Haggard) if we make it through December I’ll rest my head in your lap when you let me look up at the underside of your pointed chin pull your thighs and cheeks tight to my cheek revel in … Continue reading →

you’re too thin again like a euro model or ’50s hat rack hanging on the hollow side of the door a loan that won’t ever get repaid lips perked in a question or suggestion i swear i’d laugh if i … Continue reading →

Mother’s boyfriend has a twist in his lips, a burp in his eyes. He prefers everything cherry, thinks he knows the moon better than the astronauts. If there is leftover pie, he will use it Jackson Pollock style on the bedroom … Continue reading →

My love is trying to mug my larynx, puree my breath with his Shaman’s fork and a bloody rabbit’s foot dangling from his puffed chest. But I remind myself: this is merely breakfast in bed. Or a holiday. An exclusive … Continue reading →

You get lost in the netting of another spare night, insomnia absurd, this room making too many house calls, cat calls, calling 911 for an operator that never answers. The nightstand has a beef with the lamp. The TV turns … Continue reading →

The trees in your eyes have withered, lost their last leaves. Even the termites are foraging elsewhere. If you speak at all, the sounds kill themselves upon falling off the edge of your lips. You play black music all day, … Continue reading →

It had nothing to do with forensics. At least I don’t think. It was all about soup. Soup and the smell of grass clippings, the garbled sunshine and the slick salesperson who showed up that summer carrying an armful of forged … Continue reading →

The ant colony is taking up too much space on this bed. Everything is so busy. Dizzy. The color of Jupiter or Mars. The color F sharp. My father’s coarse fingers belong to a carpenter whose job it is to … Continue reading →

I find bits of my son dribbled like stains across the basement floor where he broke in half in front of me him already a redwood at age fifteen bark and wood splitting hot shards shooting everywhere as if thunderstruck … Continue reading →

There is no real way to heal water. Miracles are wasted on the shores and mad men with no one to believe them. Still you drop under the waves, the crispness like a full peeling off of the skin. You … Continue reading →

Another night and this terrible lust consumes me, fervent and appalling, thirsty for the bottle, willing to eat glass, airplane crash, take one for the losing team. It’s like swimming in fish guts or human entrails, oil in the eyes … Continue reading →

No one will look up and so the baby goats go on dying. It’s a bright slaughter without bleating, nothing blundered or salvaged. And those broken blades in your eyes? They glisten instead of weep while the lost stroller encircles … Continue reading →

I wish she’d never told me about the hole in the floorboards where our veins were kept, the rancid ground squalling like a belly of slaughter, the rest of the family limp noodles glued to the walls, wondering why the … Continue reading →

This is how it’s done, you floating like light inside the cool swirl of an aimless tide pool, you a girl again, giddy and reckless, thirteen or thirty it doesn’t matter, your hair coiled from salt, thoughts untangled for once, … Continue reading →

You are busy polishing cabochons that don’t need it, busy rewriting the broken music of sea shells cracked underfoot. Skyward, gulls scream for pity while the sun shimmies behind cloth clouds no different than a magician making fortune disappear. The … Continue reading →

This house, still a stranger, whispers, Relax whispers, Trust me though you’ve never thought to question a building before. You press your fingers against the window like a lover testing the heat of a pillowcase or stubbled cheek and watch … Continue reading →

You’re a quick study, which is necessary for survival, but one day you learn there are no real nightmares, just the things that never end, bindings on your ankles, tossed over, no need for a shipwreck or sinking when it’s … Continue reading →

To bleed out on this exact spot, to learn the honesty of blood, what a gift that would be, dead before your full bloom, petals sticky and still tucked before unfurling, sprouts of pubic hair nodding small whiskers on white … Continue reading →

We’ve buried ourselves inside an insistent drip where everything is blurred, fragile and shattered, like a church for soul scratchers or orphaned clouds. It’s the science of omission, a collision of blank space. When I fold myself again, logic adjusts … Continue reading →

Here I am again, time-stamped expired, a sour emulsion, like an ashtray wish rising up from beneath the irises. Even the moon forgets to pirouette, her hollow bones nailed to the souls of so many tree stumps. In the barren … Continue reading →

Wrap me in sticky cellophane, make it gritty and obscene. Drop me in a black sea without bottom where every dead fish knows my name. You don’t even need a reason. I won’t float or flinch. I’m right here, a … Continue reading →