X Æ A-Xii is off planet preparing a place for us, and what are we left to do but wait? Tracing a path across the United States, and abroad, the poems collected in Leaving Earth are meditations on the slippery, intangible notion of home. While mourning the loss of people and places, there emerges from these poems a gesture toward creating something beautiful in a world ticking to its end.
Read excerpts in:
+ "Our bones are made out of exploded stars. / We are only the shrapnel of brighter things..."
*Nominated for Best of the Net
+ "The last night I drove him home, I took a wrong turn..."
poetry
+ "In the early days, we touched as a form of resistance..."
Cold Mountain Review
+ "After sex we broke the blinds, trying to catch a glimpse..."
+ "It begins: something like a shooting star and then everything / changes..."
+ "in the beginning god created / & then i guess it was up to us / to destroy..."
+ "my partner's eye / tastes best / puffy & wet / after crying / over [redacted]'s death in Endgame..."
+ "The Swallows Sing Frank Ocean" and two other poems
+ "The sun rises like an epitaph / over rough green water..."
fiction
+ "Our only child has transformed into a starfish. They called it a compulsion, then a desire."
+ "Bobbi likes to be hit during sex, but only in certain places."
*Nominated for the Pushcart Prize
+ "A used condom rests in an oily puddle of itself in the alley below. Someone had the right idea."
other
+ "Images and words bend around us, reshaping themselves, beat by beat, into familiar things made unfamiliar."
*A response to Amanda Horowitz's performance piece Bad Stars True West