In the tenement of the body generations have left their mark. On the stairwell of bones and the walls of flesh illegible words are scrawled in invisible ink. Windows look down on concrete gardens where live buds force themselves from sticks of trees. The genes are doing their scheduled work. Clutch the banister, hold on…
The years in Cuba are behind me now.Little spotted dogs, like tiny archangelsfollowed me around. I smelled of saltand palm oil. Given the nature of belief, the effectiveness of the divine will,unforgettable and strictlyfor the birds, I could be saidto be out of touch. I read Aeschylus— the diaries—Othello on the Beach,and Peter Gunn. I…
I want this life, full of dogs and people. The trick is not stopping. The dead sleep like bugs tucked into matchboxes while the living imitate life within the confines of pink and green lines denoting states. And I see you wandering the labyrinth of your dumb animal existence, your body warm, seeking exit. Somewhere…
Every garden dreams of being Eden: rosebushes or wildflowers, it hardly matters as long as the hum of bees remains peaceable and the door to the grave stays hidden beneath a swath of grass. In the cooling afternoon each flower relaxes on its pedestal of stem, and the gardener too dreams, under a tree weighted…
For Karen and Aria In the Namib fat sand rats saunter through all the continents of their own personal deserts I started this poem thinking about Orpheus, because I am always thinking about Orpheus, strumming as the dead stir all the while, looking for death’s hawk-shaped smear, looking for amaranth seeds small as the…
The world resembles a phantom vessel destined to sail but never reach a port. The kidnapping victim bound to a sawmill tries to loosen the ropes in vain as electric sparks shower down, unsure if help is on the way. Later in life he will apprentice with a sailor and learn to pull apart every…
I’m only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I’ll be gone forever— the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I’d need for an eternity of traveling light. I’ve left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and…
Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story,…
The dancer’s dying words: get my swan costume ready. No one stirs from her bed. Elsewhere a hollowed pharaoh lies with fingers and toes capped in golden thimbles as a sandstorm thickens outside. A human-headed bird evacuates his body by day and at night returns to nest in his emptied stomach. The purpose of mummification…
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