In December 2014, I had just completed my first semester of a creative writing MFA in Boston and was home for the holiday break. Mileage may vary for those in MFAs—and elsewhere, I’ve shared some my own small and large battles—but my first sampling of fiction workshops and rhet/comp teacher
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i. There was a time. There is time, and it fools us. It really does toy. Like he put it, it is titillating, this foreplay with death. As one day dawns with
LM Brimmer is a co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose
A Short Film Starring Me at a Bathhouse I have a line
Siri Pleas Not I, not tonight. Not even halfway homewhen this notification brakes your black bikebefore the lichened gate of the communitylabyrinth— where now, we mustusher each other down the same trepid
free verse copper wires gnawed bareas thick as a little finger ready for scrapthat’s the best of what’s in my poems and in additionbreathover the coal cathedral of a half-ruined minedaytime moments airy
Our first date is at an Italian restaurant in the Upper East Side with fake brick walls. The waiter sits us down and says, “Welcome to the old country.” The fake walls
Up yonder, the sky yawns openwide in a downpour. I suck greedy on the silken stem of one last God-white honeysuckle blossom & I watch the rain close in. The hot aircrackles
* * * * * * * * * * Each morning before breakfast my grandfather walked to the edge of the yard to raise the flag, to fly its colors near the heavens. My job was to hold the hard pack of
Accumulated through the season, like black exhauston white snow, winter cruelties linger—a dirtyepidermal merengue sealing in all that wouldotherwise melt within us; the closing of the bellowsthat precedes the closing case. We
To think there is such a thingas a good dayis to neglect the sun’s eternal indifferenceto the clouds and fogthat bottle it up invisibleand block its raysfrom reaching our foreheads. What kindof
the newspaper boy once told melove is loud. scream three times each day, and someone will at least feed you: sugar-snap peas thrown, showeringlike hail, macadamia nutsscattered like words, even safflower seeds sprinkling the nest of
(Where neither photography nor sketching were allowed) I. The freighted thud of a rock hitting an ice sheeted pond. No crack. White shavings lay in the sundry mud and leaves thrown off
All things considered, it is a comedy about fruit. People travel from miles around to buy produce from the stand on the side of the highway. They get out
