Vertical

English My Love, I cannot go outside today; It is snowing. I will not come but I will wait. When the sun comes out, I will enter your life again. Mongolian (Modern) Амраг минь би гадаа өнөөдөр гарч чадахгүй гадаа цас орж байн. Би чамруу очиж чадахгүй гэхдээ би хүлээнэ. Нар гармагц, бид хамтдаа байх […]

Final Night

Smelling the emptiness of the place that was once filled with familiar sounds and sights to tickle my breaths, one can’t help but imagine where everything used to be placed with the utmost care and think about how quickly it was all taken down. Composed 06/07/14 Author’s Note: This is the last poem I have […]

Tumpin

Kneeling before the neon pink goddess, hands cupped in prayer, then splayed out to receive her divine waters and throw them upon my dirty body. The waters darken, my knees ache, and the floor around begins to get bespeckled with my messy aim. Running my hands over my neck and ears, underarms and feet, […]

144 Character Poems: Set 2

A Slender Man He is so slender, like the lengthening Spring days. Thin as the shadows, glowing like the sun. Let’s see how we can make him break. Composed 03/05/14 Air Dried Dirty water cleans our clothes constantly assaulted by wind, dust, and earth, drying snaky river beds into our creases, seemingly impossible to remove. […]

Puppet Show

Running about the auditorium holding puppets that shroud the hands and create shadowy pulses across felt and marble, the puppeteers writhe their fingers in rhythmic trance to bewitch our senses and convince us of their mastery in the arts of language and perception but what if that suspension, that agreed upon deception were to shatter […]

Reverse

Swept away by unblinking eyes on triangle horizons, a sailor adrift on land where he smells no salt and tastes no depths, instead smelling cooked grass firmly planted on lands so high he hopes that one day he might catch a glimpse of the sea until he realizes his legs wobble with uncertainty once more. […]

Spring Blizzard

Snow so white that it glows blue under the gray-lit skies of something not quite night but certainly not the day nor twilight crushes underfoot as heavy sighs lament the hostile whims of their ancestral home. Composed 04/24/14 Author’s Note: Freak snow storms are common in winter here in Mongolia. I was told, apparently, these […]

Steppe Rules

Welcome, my most esteemed guest to this humble patchwork of bent walls, carved and painted supports, and felt so recently worn by spring sands that it resembles pitch but steams far less. Sit. Sit. Sit! Not on the left, nor on the right, but up here next to the first table and the set of […]

Cold Morning

In the cold shrillness of the warmest thing in the room, I can tell that everything so delicately constructed will now fall apart. Composed 04/12/14 Author’s Note: More practice with keeping the poems short. It was a rough couple of days.

Leaving

Who can tell when the single drop disappears into the infinite of the tide pool leaking its life into the grey and blacks of the ocean’s ward? Swimming in the gold and ambers of cheap Russian beer, a deluge of singles fill a space that has no real boundaries to hold them. Nothing can stop […]