Ghost Writer. But first, Snow Flurries. by Hibah Shabkhez

BORN furiously svelte, snow-flurries maim / Themselves as they storm the cold skin, to be / Merged, meshed into an itchy trickle: // Their hearts burn with the earth’s nurturing zest / That touches with stone-cool, tender gloves / All life, that holds slime-things dear as flowers. // Come watch her lungs melt in a man-set flame, / Her dwindling fingers drown in their own sea; / The snow-flurries, born fierily fickle...

...READ MORE

for evan
(#86 most popular boy’s name)
you know who you are

They came out to
Watch the moon,
A chalky paleness in the sky,
Wet from an evening’s
Snow, gathering shadows
In a field and hoarding them.

Hers has a hole
In the place
Where a nipple
Lives.

"Why not the garage? You could live in the garage?" Daisy suggested. She was in the living room closet, pulling out the vacuum cleaner.

"No," Charley said. “The garage is full.”

"If you organized."

"Why don't you live in the garage?

'Eurydice sits alone on a red bed.' —Kathy Acker

One sultry evening in June, Salomi the home-owner on the fifth floor leant precariously out of the living room window of her spacious multi-storey brownstone in the heart of New York City, when oddly out of the blue Wham! she was struck perpendicularly in the face by a piano being winched up to one of the upper floors above. The dizzying certainty with which it exploded was like an iron manhole cover rocketing out of control by a jet steam. The blow made her reel.

"I'd like to think of the city as a tree. It doesn't move around—at least not yet, in our current era—but its interior is alive, dynamic; full of layered growth rings in which the most diverse kinds of fluids and elements run. Trees grow and evolve, they can live for thousands of years and abridge varied species, just like a city. I would like to imagine my city as an ancient sequoia, vigorous and robust in its almost one thousand years of life. But, just like trees, cities fall victim to parasites, leeches, fungoid bodies, and whatever other opportunistic organisms lurk under their shading leaves; and, in the same way as cities, trees rot from inside out..."