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:…
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…
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…
Around that time, the city grew quiet. You said Don’t hurt me and I said If I was going to hurt you I’d have done it already. We passed a dying store with gem-like windows. A door that banged in the wind. You said Let me go. As in a film of the apocalypse, a…
Already, his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn’t even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had…
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…
When Martín Espada turned twenty, a family friend gave him a copy of the anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry. Along with the gift, the friend ventured some words of prophecy: "Tú también serás poeta," he told Espada—"You will also become a poet." The book had been edited by Roberto Márquez, a Nuyorican (New York–born Puerto…
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