It isn’t dependable as a guide when it flows From a grudge against the body, but consider How helpful it proved in prompting the god Who revealed himself to the prophet Amos To gag when he sniffed the savor rising From temple altars. The smoke of sacrifice Stank in his nostrils when the fires were…
Here at El Paso airport I wait for Valentina who will take me to the other side to read poems like this one in Juárez Valentina is late soldiers are standing in line laughing teasing one another I was going to write: like hyenas about to smell their prey but I shouldn’t dehumanize them right?…
“Do all dudes have one big testicle and one little tiny one?” Hieronymus asked hiking up his poodle skirt as we staggered Down Main Street in our getup of wigs and pink bonnets The night we sprayed NEGROPHOBIA all over the statue of Robert E. Lee guarding the county courthouse, a symbol of the bondage…
It’s because you’re a woman that you don’t want me to die, Tayari says. On their way home, the No. 6 train sidling its slow way through the South Bronx, she has her head in his lap, her long gangly legs splayed out over three seats, fingers hooked into his dreadlocks. She likes to…
Sky, cloudless. Light, unhampered as it falls across the mountains, across the lake, across the trees surrounding the lake. Day after day, a woman watches this light move across the landscape. In her story, the hero sails away, saddened, angry— while the light casts harsh shadows. The hero is never seen again. Everyone speaks of…
You have been here before and you remember the empty streets, the fire, and after that the stairs crowded with bells. This pregnant woman was your wife, she laughed—and whispered the story to her belly: how did the deafness come? To the sound of bells— you bent to tie your shoes to the sound of…
It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in school day morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled at the thought of her mouth filled for a moment with both of our short names. I don’t know what we saw when we saw her face, but at…
We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead of the smoky yellow of my upbringing. She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flowerbed, her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. Precisely, the lit…
I saw once, in a rose garden, a remarkable statue of the Roman she-wolf and her twins, a reproduction of an ancient statue—not the famous bronze statue, so often copied, in which the wolf’s blunt head swings forward toward the viewer like a sad battering ram, but an even older statue, of provenance less clear….
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