She is standing in the doorway of the barn loft, swaying backwards and forwards. Both her hands are over her head and flat against the inside of the lintel; her heels come off the floor on her forward motion, and she keeps her toes down on her backward motion, curling them around the rough…
I stood on Mr. Silvia’s porch with my last thirty-six dollars rolled in a rubber band tucked between breast and belly fat. I remembered the house from when I was a kid. Back then it was a gap-toothed barn where we played while birds flew in and out above us. Now it was a…
what it was without growing old a fever a checkup the cold front dragging a rake a plow Pain thinks of something biography a place a word clearing & threshing snow & leaves opening the hour without growing old what it was Pain thinks of something arthritis blindness colloquy of field & figure light what…
Because we wanted things the way they were in our minds’ black eyes we waited. The beaver raising ripples in a vee behind his head the thing we wanted. A weed is what might grow where you don’t want it; a dahlia could be a weed, or love, or other notions. The heart can’t choose…
Drunk off his can and pissed at the ruse of another day, backache a bum rap and woodpile shrunk to kindling, the old man stood at the kitchen sink and stared out at his neighbor’s cow. What a filthy beast, he thought. What a stinking, cud-chewing, gas-spewing waste of a field. And then, because what…
after Lena Cronqvist Whose girls are these, Lena, yours, mine, ours, everyone’s? So many deny them (Oh, no, not more of those!) Often your sister Sometimes another girl Always your parents (For me dark is normal) Is it conceivable your parents or my own actually could have done anything deserving of how the girls treat…
translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh Thankless street—little dry goods stores like sentries in Napoleon’s frozen army; country people peer into shop windows and their reflections gaze back at the dusty cars; Long Street trudging slowly to the suburbs, while the suburbs head for the center. Lumbering trams groove the street, scentless perfume shops…
Hoping to find my way to the river, wide with April’s rain, and to see, perhaps, a few wildflowers, and maybe a cardinal whistling in a blossoming tree, I took a path I’d never taken before, first through woods and then a sloping meadow, across a fast stream, then into another meadow, above whose green…
The blinds of midnight are your hands saved from freezing. Such is the heart, and that pause, the somber hollow beneath. Sweet prophet, I name you and your ancestors fidget. I say your temples spill with losses and your shadow bursts with laughing. I say morning thickens with peregrines, flowing soft above the waves, flowing…
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