“Dead Bananas” is in 12th Street Journal’s 10th issue. Peels on Park Avenue. There is a brown banana sitting on a fruit rack. The dark-wood fruit rack has three tiers that taper to its top. It is a prop reminiscent of the Dutch masters—the scenes they studied with oil paints. If you were to inspect it more closely, you would find a thin layer of dust that gives the rack its Old World earthiness—a real craquelure quality. The banana isn’t alone on the fruit rack: there is a globe of garlic, with one clove missing. Hard, green tips protrude from…
some notes on a routine for better womaning
open your lips with rosewater drenched on a cotton pad. mist it on your creases and recite poems on the toilet. take a cold silver vessel. pour three pools of bitter oil. move it into your mouth. swallow. any morning full of empty basins. cup, sink out of water, aching belly. my womb is exhausted. i’d like to write about a phallus occasionally but the literary penis has always been off limits. or everywhere i can’t say which it is both. contact the goddesses. if they don’t answer they’re outside of you somewhere making love in a…
