You Can't Be a Ghost, I Never Proved You Were Alive

Jesus, James. Twice in one week, sunset
has found me driving past the bookstore.
It is nowhere near where I live now,
but from time to time I need a smiling face,
a wave from the cash register.

Two times, James, two times. You
do not believe in coincidence and
your paranoia is contagious. Those trees
--manicured saplings in winter coats
of white sparks--

awaken as I watch. The light
is red at the corner of the parking lot.
I have the dreary length of this shuffling traffic
to shake my head and stare, to say,
Jesus, James, why now?

October 25th: Tree of Life/Men and Angels

To those of you in the New York City and Connecticut area*:



Come say hello! There will be art, and book signing, and Cass, and Emily, and James, and me! It's sure to be a fantastic show.


*The gallery is about an hour outside of the city, convenient to train stations, and you really have no excuse.

Overactive, Daughter of the Pantheon

She opened her mouth wide and pushed the disk of the moon in,
held it on her tongue like the body of Christ.
Last week she had hit a cat with her car,
and as she buried its cooling heart commended
its soul to what gods as would find it
and weigh it properly,
and its body to the mounds of earth
just off the Post Road.
As the first drops of rain spotted her cheeks
she felt her feet growing together,
silver-scaled like armor.

Mummified Cat by Cassandra Barney

H(a)unting

She took the long way home.
As she crested a hill she saw it:
The cloud-murked moon, color of the setting city sun,
seated on the horizon like a broken bowl.

She doubted her eyes and drove on,
winding through streets of darkened houses,
peering down driveways, crawling past the bars and jewelers downtown.

It caught her around the corner of a bakery.
The sight of it squeezed her heart and took fistfuls
of her lungs,
and she drove on, eyes wide, mind still.

untitled

The shadows of the deer flew
across the Post Road
just beyond the reach of my headlights,
hunched like fugitives.
There is a darkness, they told me
as they wandered into the trailer park,
that you cannot control, a drumbeat
you can neither silence
nor ignore.