When my mother turned sixty, she kissed the invisible stars on the foreheads of her two grown men and deemed them worthy stars The sky, a vaulted blue dome, empties itself and fills Pyongyang with quick, fluid stars Tonight, longing fans out like a silk curtain over an empty room; a girl’s eyes burn…
Once there was a woman who was asked by a stranger to carry a foreign object with her onto a plane: When the stranger approached her, the woman was sitting at the edge of her chair a few feet from the gate out of which her plane was scheduled to leave. Her legs were crossed….
Bored, I open the back of an ancient clock And the minutes pile out, Exhausted from spinning Out the same hammered seconds. The minutes stagger on the table And collapse, for they are dizzy, For they have realized they have no legs, For the surface of the table is flat And what have they known…
The boy could sometimes see, could sense his father’s fondness for a thing. One Christmas he spurned comic books, penciled “shotgun” on his list to prove he’d moved beyond the tin cans and the .22. En route to the rite of deer, perhaps hunt birds…like tiny planes; safe in a blind, he’d take his time…
Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them, or lead them to very clearly marked sections (if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?) while they complained that nothing was arranged by title….
The world is always burning, you should fly from the burning if you can, and you should hold your head oh either above or below the dust and you should be careful in the blocks of Bowery below or above the Broome that always is changing from one kind of drunkenness to another for that…
What one thinks to hold Is what one thinks to know, So comes of simple hope And leads one on. The others there the same With no one then to blame These flowered circles handed. So each in turn was bonded. There the yellow bees will buzz, And eyes and ears appear As listening, witnessing…
Olivia Alcuaz set down platters of spaghetti, tortillas, tomato and cucumber salad. She sat, lifted her chest as if she were in posture class, and launched into a tale about her cousin Enrique. Enrique had been driving down from Mexico when there were reports of a terrible crash involving a white car. Enrique’s car was…
New York City, August 13, 2003 All this is not unusual in DR or Iraq. The city’s extension cord shorts. Afternoon, offices evacuate. The focus is on feet, some people walking through boroughs for the first time. We stare at our feet, elbow to elbow eyeing packed buses. Some hitch rides on the back of…
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