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…
J. M. W. Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On” (1840) How it is That up is known Here, outstretched umber hands Punch through An ocean’s concave mirror from Death’s inverse Universe —But that’s Not in this view That Wasn’t me We say now To the flame-shaped…
Holding bread crust up to my lips, I watch a crow hop past its black feathered anchor into just a bit of atmosphere. My cat lunges into a rhododendron bush, another January mouse pushed out of earth. Disemboweled, its whiskered head will be left behind like a misplaced chess piece or bodiless, a perfect…
In the end, the end seems probable, but before come many votes and murders. The common redstart votes for its own splendor among the other splendid things; the virgin murders her own abashed vocabulary, pretending to a toughness she does not as yet possess. Possess she will, in time, a rude demeanor…
i. There are hands around a small neck. Climb in closer. Without line these your limbs, gills, wrist a small cut on a mid-season day. Now the squirrel arabesques limb to limb dropping not falling. ii. Gated all awake. Eaten all your conflagrated hate. Pulled down toward. Pull down toward. This your cord….
What’s it like now to be shot in the foot by yourself, when you were aiming elsewhere and didn’t want any kind of trouble? How else could you frustrate yourself more, what with your foot oozing blood, and the gun smoke clouding the air so you can’t think, and that bird you wanted…
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