sometimes I’m issued a new headand the old one dropsoff and then I see the new one isn’t newit’s a usedhead, sometimes a bit moldyor flushedwith rage, this headfilled with notes on what is wrong with the worldor carrying a listof expendables or groceriesa head that remembers sunset castinga golden shineinto the wheator the painting…
A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave.It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holidayin the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the otherthe same plus chestnut spots, drift abovewhite-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richnessto the situation, paralleling the stinks and murderpoking up everywhere, each an…
a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hillsor someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a coldlobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrasethat explains everything and then you’re revokingyesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattanor you’ve just changed the name of your dreamboat and…
I took absence down to the ocean and becauseit is blind, I told it about the waves.I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my armsaround the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges.I walked beside absence in the streets at nightand I let it tell me stories. Child who is…
Somehow, Benzy hadn’t become a rabbi. He wished it were more complex than that, but it was not. He lived in his parents’ windowless basement in a Crown Heights brownstone that, if it did have windows, would have faced one of the biggest yeshivas in the neighborhood, which was basically a rabbi factory. Benzy had…
At the front desk, Mamoru tells the receptionist that they are married. “Yes, my wife prefers darker colors. She would like one that’s dark blue or indigo,” he says, selecting the yukata that they will wear to dinner. Sachiko can hear him from where she sits in the lobby. The inn, Oyako Koto no Yume,…
translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra Nina Hansen’s on her way home and it’s been a long day. While she was researching and writing, she almost didn’t notice that buzzing in her ear. Her left ear. When she’s idle and alone, it feels as if a bumblebee’s sitting in there, the kind you find…
Every drip startles me: rain falling off the edge of mooninto the earth. Asleep next to a man who does not love meany more than he loves a river. I move to another room,closer to the rain without being touched. My brother sleeps (does he sleep?) in a rehab center in the Blue Ridge Mountains.I pray…
“Fire at a Brooklyn Warehouse Puts Private Lives on Display,”(1 Feb 2015, The New York Times) No lives were lost. Nothing was guttedbut the crumpling warehouse and its contents:medical forms, court transcripts, sonograms, bank checks. They’re like treasure maps,someone said of the half-charred scraps.But they weren’t. This was the opposite— it was as if the…
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