LUTE MUSIC Yeats said music makes us crazy. At its behest, lazy distracted men and women fall into swamps or drown embracing the moon. Oh but that was booze, the…
Author: Alex Custodio
66 Have you ever seen a grafted tree? They’re rare. I once saw one that bore apples and pears. It was truly weird and strangely beautiful, Twice-fruited. Copious, plentiful, Glorious.…
Where is the body in the poem? This is a question I have been asking a lot lately, and will continue to ask as I embark on a collection of…
LADY ODDBALL I’ve discovered the shortest route between two wants is a scream. Called into life, an undersong of grief, a magpie of magic, the seed of my legend focuses…
TO ARGILLITE, RETURNING SURFACING BEHAVIOUR Just shy of Alaska, catamaraning the contested Dixon Entrance A-B Line somewhere south of Prince of Wales Island we’re waiting with whale-sized patience for…
WHAT WE DO “Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars” –Gary Soto Either rip off cereal box coupons, or don’t, make note of how much milk is left, think…
PROLOGUE from Second Growth, Creekstone Press 2014 we came for wilderness, bounding trail, rinds of trail slumping into streambed, river mud hugging our shoes, pulling ourselves deeper into the forest…
WELFARE SUITE I. an an afterschool special “olly olly oxen free,” I circled the snowy perimeter bushy play zone edges I hid for fear of finding out she let the…
FROM HALF-LIFE, A POEM-LIKE THING “every man is capable of showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of…
PIONEER 10 Its shadow’s been gone since lift-off but it took light disappearing before lonely seemed simply alone, or if not alone then deep in the lab of the…
THE BOOK OF LIFE Though Ari won’t believe in God, she knows that something somewhere must be counting—calories and carbon use, every inner tube she’s ever burst, every acid-crusted battery—somewhere…
SELECTIONS FROM FROM THE POPLARS a large group of men line the street from the back door of the Land offices they await an opportunity to gain a piece of…