contributors’ notes Winter 2005–06 ralph angel‘s Neither World received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His third and most recent collection, Twice Removed, is available from Sarabande Books. A fourth collection, Exceptions and Melancholies, as well as his translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo, are forthcoming from Sarabande…
Well, there’s the lack of vacuuming, carrot juice spills on the ivory couch, dust running along the floorboards like a pet, veiling the TV, sills, the furnishings of books, shoes without glue, the lack of comfortable seating or dining, the canopy I gave away, childhood desk sold, gold chair left in a spidery garage, rose…
Our father wanted to climb Mount Moriah and we refused to go unless it was understood we were going against our will— unless we could climb by suffering, dragging ourselves step by step through the boxwood glade, withheld birch, glinting ash, oak bent to the will of the south wind— that was our secret, denial,…
He speaks a farewell kiss to me. —Bob Dylan Pagan psalmody singing his checkered face into my sleep, tomahawk at our side, head in the bag. Ready to venture out against the colorless light, slandering a white gaze. That’s all it takes to find the world on its bow, turn a wheel against…
Swingmatism | You hear a bird sing, you don’t try to understand. Sissle | Listen to anything long enough it’ll tell you your life. Tiny | Pine siskin, dickcissel, longspur, purple finch, lark sparrow, wheatear, winter wren, waterthrush, veery. Ornithology | Bird dream felt like fell from the nest, felt like…
We were young again. Sex as an act of reverence was not yet even imaginable. There was no such thing . . . The point was to push eventually past mere distraction, to achieve an effacement entirely of what, inside us, we couldn’t bear looking long at, no, not a moment longer, what was pleasure…
I’ve slipped out early from the Jersey summer home where my family’s vacationing with Auntie Liz and Uncle Duke, whose black Lincoln stinks of cigar, and who, Dad says, is “rich as Crease-us,” who Dad says is “rich as Crease-us.” Fog squirms inside me as I squinch across the sand, gripping my four-foot fishing rod:…
I decided that we were in the old firehouse after some kind of fire, undressing, and the feeling was the same old feeling, that is everyone wanted to get drunk, but we could not do that, so we undressed heavily and breathed heavily, each breath a full pint, and I sat on a stool beside…
In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 23, not the side where the Arco station is, but on the other side, which slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are made out of paper bags and sand and candles, and they burn past…
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