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…
At the moment the dog dies some last good leaves your body, Omen. Oh, you, woman without mother, father, lover, this dog with his final sweet breath snout. Harbinger, oh, you: lay thee down in the bracken & brush. In a morning beyond tomorrow morning, by some strength not fully your own, drag yourself to…
Albert Arno, the film director, dropped dead at his home in the middle of a sentence. It was early evening and his wife, Lynne, was lifting a dish of potato gratin out of the oven. Albert came out of the downstairs shower room, one striped towel wrapped round his waist, rubbing his neck with another:…
Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author Radiant white pipe laughing deep down in Jesus’ eyes, the glow is astonished, returns. Wet bandage wrapped around your head, does it hurt? Fra Angelico’s tongue is tin. The ants on it are the hills of Tuscany. What was it that soaked Fra Angelico, nobody…
Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah The birds’ departure from his heart leaves the plains white where the story is white and sleep is white and silence is the caller’s icon. A laugh of sand will sprout when the door is opened from fear’s angle, a hymn for the grand winter, and the voices of…
In Heaven ants are the doormen to the flies I climbed out of one butchered ballroom into another climbing out of my half-life into my new life on earth My brother right behind me Home The ants are a straight line of suicides showing us the way out of here The flies are suicides with…
At first, it is a tiny flap of skin no bigger than a fingernail, like a mole or a birthmark but with more substance. I find it when I’m in the bath, the water cooling around me and my father’s razor floating across the surface, reminding me of his presence below the window in the…
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