In the brevity of my long experience — reading, writing, breathing, thinking — smoke is one of those magical words that is almost impossible to distinguish from the thing it represents. Like the sting of my youth and the gentle gathering of age, it finds its way everywhere, as color, in scent, in memory. And what I can’t quite fathom on the page because of it, I know the more […]
About twenty years ago, I wrote a story about an old woman who died in a library. Had I taken this approach, maybe it wouldn’t have been rejected so many times — not that this piece is necessarily any better, but one never knows. Of course, twenty years ago this approach would never have occurred to me, as back then I was still struggling with occasional bouts of sanity. […]
The ritual drowning of poems only to turn your back on that muddy river and find a halo around an apple tree up to its bough in sin. Poems, Slightly Used, April 30, 2010 [ 88 ]
Dragonfly prehistoric blue these ants have made of you a church without a bell. Poems, Slightly Used, May 31, 2009 [ 87 ]
I clench the pipe between my teeth. No tobacco. I think about a trip to the store, the fine aroma of a newly opened pouch. But I don’t get up. Instead, I light an imagined match with the flick of a nail, and then I puff and inhale, puff… and… inhale. The store is a little place on the corner in an undiscovered country. There’s a bell on the door. […]
A beggar with a wide flat back, bent to tie what’s left of his shoes, laces foul, nails gone, smelling for all the world like human rust, and I, a lamp post anchored to this spot, painted like a song to resemble steel, desperately in need of hands. Poems, Slightly Used, October 10, 2010 [ 72 ]
Early each morning, the people quietly arose, then emerged from their cottages with their pitchers to fill them with light. It was wonderful to see them gathered at the well — mothers first with their children, each child with a pitcher of its own, infants with tiny thimbles old men trembling to keep hold, farmers, midwives, poets. There was a wise saying in those days: First, let us bring light. […]
The stage isn’t really a stage; but then again the sky isn’t the sky either, unless there happens to be a light rain falling, dripping from a pine or from the edge of a tall gray building. Dawn, or at least a suggestion of it. Reminder: Talk to the person who handles the lighting. The cast consists of two characters, who for the entire play alternate between looking skyward and […]
A stone in a bottomless pond — a sky so deep, my eye is a star. Poems, Slightly Used, November 23, 2010 [ 46 ]
I find him eating butterflies. They’re beautiful, he says. If I eat enough of them, I’ll be beautiful too. He stuffs a monarch in his mouth, fuzz clinging to his lips. I hear the flowers weep. He begins to eat them too, stray petals on his shoes. A hummingbird arrives — dips her bill into his eye, takes a long, melancholy drink. What to think — is he crazy, or […]
William Michaelian 