One night you lay half in the dark Holding a framed picture And studied your granddaughters’ faces By the light of the reading lamp Whispering their names to yourself As you tapped each face with your finger And kept your focus steady As the beam’s illumination Worried about the shadow That would cross their faces…
jolie might not be one of your color colony dates but I know just what you, calm to coordination, might say. these luminous treasures before me might not be at brink of what’s poisonous but pollen down the river like women we lost passes like a morning cooking a mother long-lived and radiant where…
Old Zhang, the security guard at a government housing complex, was about to leave his room to lock the wrought-iron gate when he heard a heavy, yet muffled thud from outside. He rushed out, guessing that a flower pot had dropped from an apartment above, a not-uncommon accident because many families liked to grow flowers…
1. I knocked on the picture window of the Marlin Cafe, trying to get the bartender’s attention, so I could get in and have a Sunday morning hangover drink. The Marlin was an old man’s dive on Broadway near Cathedral Parkway, a street that everyone in the neighborhood called 110th Street. Technically, the bar was…
Furious snow cardinals & diode array. Methuselah walks by me in coats. Vast brackets of light. Those sugar packets on the road: a branch encased in ice would almost seem to indicate them. The first bomb opens itself in space. By red by half-silvered light—“to home.” How that a life were but a place?…
Bones like a bird’s you quicken your hands, flit and mock, take stock of who’s watching— every move a melodrama, a poised snap, a shot that shapes you as the lead of a film no one can stop. Your fingers play invisible keyboards, your toes point, turn out in stance, your…
The summer school boys wore coats and ties, even in the heat. They were the irreverent children of suburban lawyers, of diplomats, of hopeful scientists working in the big federally funded labs outside of the city. When their parents dropped them off at the top of the school’s long drive, the boys’ required coats were…
We would like to grow herbs, cooking herbs and chamomile and lavender, and keep birds, farm fish, collect dogs and cats and horses. There isn’t enough room in the apartment. We need a plant to cover the litter boxes in the bathroom. There’s an unfinished birdcage you’ve built in the bedroom and now you’ve started…
for Grace There’s an oak leaf, one caught in the latch on the door lodged like a letter in a letter box. It knocks slowly, eight-prongs the wind tips it back, head leaning away stem like a tail, wind knocking softly turning over the life of a tough brown leaf. Stronger than a grasping hand,…
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