I wonder what Tomaz is doing in the afterlife. It’s not totally dark yet here but my shadow is getting pretty confident. There wasn’t a window here before but there is now. I know I’m nothing but a drop of water but not if I’m rain or dew or a tear from a stone eye….
after Rilke His vision, from the constant cascade of chicken wire, has grown So benumbed it contains Nothing else, save for his lastness, though he doesn’t know this. Yet he knows, in the manner That beasts can know, that his name is Benjamin, & the name Comes with meat scraps,…
Those of you who’ve gone before how precious you remain how little your essential nature has altered and insofar as it has I can’t grasp how you might be other than you ever were surely you aren’t wholly “gone” though that’s undeniably your essence now to have gone surely you haven’t even metaphorically risen or…
from Thresholds Eating a sandwich at the desk at the window tracing the oak’s bare winter branching the thick lacing network is more an illusion unhindered by the system’s like extensions no constraint to the path each finds in the air. Gray fissured bark makes home for the lichen…
Old news: leaf parchment crackles underfoot. Pine needles, acorns, lichen. The waterfall only a patter sliming the cliff. The slope rumples down through mountain laurel and pitches below to ramparts of slate, shattered quarries, a moss-streaked bluff. We tread on silver flakes and shadows. Downward, ever downward, to the meadow where the ghost lily, late…
Green tips of tulips are rising out of the earth— you don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans in an arroyo but catch the budding tips of pear branches and wonder what it’s like to live along a purling edge of spring. Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon skeleton on the White…
Jewish American fiction, only a small presence in the American literary landscape before World War II, quickly became a colossus in the decades after. Besides the prize-winning big three of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, talents as diverse as Cynthia Ozick, Leonard Michaels, and Gerald Shapiro contributed to a collective body of work that managed to…
The last of a late night’s argument, the dreadful unsnarling of intent— our what you said and what I meant, and neither of us penitent. After the hours and anger spent, what I continue to resent there in the bed, the dark apartment taking its turn as the respondent— babbling pipes, sighing vent— is how,…
A man with CRCK on his snapback. A man in a BLDBTH hoodie [what happened to the affable vowels?]. I stay shy of the men on the bus because we know who we are. We are propelled by kimchi and cologne that smells of diesel fuel and demon. Five hours of trance and hard consonants….
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