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  • Modern Prototype

    We melt the old thing into the new thing. Tongs, a ladle the size of a man’s head I fill with thoughts of molten steel. Fire below the cauldron, in our cigarettes, in the right hand of the man coming back from the bathroom with his skin mag. He’d tell me, were I to ask,…

  • Thetis on Achilles, The Son

    Starts in estuary                   whelm and whirl of rock-skin,          sea-swell, the hove called salt.                            I loved the hero-to-be,                            his life first arrowed unto me,                                     scudding, spared, still                                     unconscious.                            No                                     he and she to wash                   away yet, my inhale planked to his ex—.                            Plus our everywhere wet…

  • Rue de Poitiers

    translated by Clare Cavanagh Late afternoon, light snow. The Musée d’Orsay is on strike, beside it a gray lump huddled on the sidewalk’s edge: a bum curled in a ball (maybe a refugee from some country caught in civil war) still lying on the grate, packed in a quilt, a scrap-heap sleeping bag, the right…

  • Cane Fire

    At the bend of the highway just past the beachside melon and papaya stands Past the gated entrance to the Kuilima Hotel on the point where Kubota once loved to fish, The canefields suddenly begin—a soft green ocean of tall grasses And waves of wind rolling through them all the way to the Ko‘olau, a…

  • Do Something

      The soldiers keep Margaret in view. She carries her tripod, unsteadily, and an extra poncho for a bib. That they have let her come this far might be due to the weather, or possibly the kinds of amusements of which she remains unaware. Still, assume that they watch, tracking her as she stomps along…

  • In the Center of Water

    translated by Maria Koundoura and the author   In its center all is water you were saying that night, if you remember as the fire was dimming the light on the moist fingernails slowly peeling the dry skin from the orange before sinking into its yellow succulence A woman, the boy, fruit in this world…

  • Vesuvius

    Every morning in the hour before you wake, when the sun squares off against the kitchen floor, and the cups from last night still wear necklaces of wine, stoles of milk, I hear waves in the walls. A tide swells from the corner behind the fridge: crest and crash, and that silty forgiveness of sand…

  • Cry Baby

      a novel excerpt She lost me as the nation was losing Richard Nixon, good riddance, whose head bobbled on his neck like a newborn’s, as mine would have, but whose five o’clock shadow was like the truth coming out. A loss to no one but himself.       She sought for me early in the Ford…

  • 14 rue Serpentine

    1. In the yard of the children’s prison the fruit on the solitary tree is blue shriveled beyond recognition At the turn of the last century the inmates (aged 7 to 13) pickpockets petty thieves & vandals ate gruel from wooden bowls and slept on iron cots gazing down from their cells at that tree…