Sometimes, after my daily dose of radiation, I would stop at a small bath store near the hospital to buy a bar of soap, perhaps, or a bottle of bath gel. I liked the little shop; it was holding its own among the retro hippie emporia of the neighborhood, no hint yet of tea tree…
The first time it happened he assumed something had crawled into her fur—a hornet, maybe, or a spider (it was a chill day in October, so it might have been seeking warmth)—or that the dog had somehow lodged a shard of glass in her hair while rolling in the dirt. He’d been sitting in the…
What a name to call your sister—Nada:Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish,where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds of the way to Nathalie where, in French, the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth, the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the wordcontagious, even Mom fizzing laughteras she said, “Don’t call your…
I am in Dublin having dinner with an Irish man of whom I am quite fond. “Am I wrong in saying your family owned a sweet shop?” I ask him. “Well, it was more than a sweet shop. It was a place that made all sorts of candies and some small cakes and what you…
It is so and so and not the dusty worldwho drops. It is their mother and not the dusty worldwho drops them. Why I imagine her so oftenempty-handed as houseboats’ distant lightsrise and fall on the far ripples—I do not know. I know that darkness.Have stood on that bridgein the space between the streetlightsdizzy with…
If description is a living thing, dark cherry hair and glass eyes, tilted away—I want to say something that will look at me. If to memorize is to adore and cannot afford distraction or a socket neck that rotates the head away, if death is turning away, with long brown human hair, revolving like a globe, from …
César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday April 15, 1938 It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you. Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too. No doubt Juana Vasquez was killed. The killers, poor also, were skilled. And Emilio, they shot him, in the back of the neck, after they made…
Everything recedes With such grand effort. A morsel On the winter palace floor. In the trees Up ahead, a light goes out, asleep In her summer arms. Hate is born As a monument to our inattention and the blind Greed of disbelief. Even the heroin addict has more Conviction, morbidly patient with his addiction. Work,…
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