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I Family is and is not a velveteen pillow theater a dinner hour mistake with candied yams on the side a box at the bottom of flightless penguins hitchhiking through town footprints in a cemetery II Symmetry two moon pies per gypsy greedy art and dirigible need rushes and reeds tracing paper on papyrus the…

The better the book, the more of us it reads. Even as I look away, words float? across a world I never knew was there. Page after page, I feel the light wind? breathe a little sense into things.? Why would it be any different with you. I knew a man once who had one…

The moths in the orchard squeal with each pass of the mistral wind. Yet the reapers and their scythes, out beyond the pear trees, slay wheat in sure columns. Christ must have been made of shocks of wheat. When they lashed him, four bundles of fine yellow burst forth from each welt. And the women,…

They seem disappointed in you, these faceless women, these shrinking enlargements standing around you, some turning away from the eye you can see through. You want to be open about all this, but what’s left of your mouth won’t say so, and what’s right can’t say anything good or bad. You wonder where you’ve been…

“I hate Ladytown—so much can go wrong down there.” —Steph Things weren’t looking good in Ladytown. True, it was always lush, like D.C. in August, high humidity, but that year the very brickwork sweated salt. That year the Metro chafed the tunnel walls and the train whistles’ wail rose to a new pitch of dismay,…

How do you hold the dead when they’re hammered into a room so flat you can pick your teeth with one corner of the picture? When you were the one at that moment aiming the cheap camera at her wanting to fold her light into a square locket of time. You could see Noah’s Ark…

I’d like, about now, a little small talk, the grown-up kind between long agons some summer afternoon across a table, when what’s not said is not evasion but another language, every empty word and nodded half-sentence a hand laid on the arm. Such sweetness, all that time, you around me, like the rain in the…

A run-down hall of echoes. Shout your name,? You will hear it again, from generations? Gone before you . . . The souls they have become By the million, look at them, transmigrating Out of Europe, dragging sailors’ trunks? Aboard the Pullmans—conscious of rank, Edwardian . . . There they go, to break the bank…

Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author Every ball is a bloody, beautiful mask of powerful people. We make up pretzels. I always did like chickens. O, slender fez, mildew perching on its fur. The poet is an oafish celeb on a hood. Of every wondrous power. On a hood. I glance…