As one opponent calling out checkmate an hour past midnight could crack a man already broken and bring allegations from his tongue, violence to his veins, bring him to rise and hip-knock the table so the legs screech, so the pieces quiver and topple, the bishop a salt shaker kissed by an elbow, bring him…
Learn to think like a horse her trainer said. She went into the pasture at noon, when her horses lay down to sleep without fear of coyotes, without fear. They sensed her but did not mind as she stretched out beside them with the June heat’s broad strong hand flattening her into the grass. Now,…
I escape. I board Northwest 18 to New York, via Tokyo. The engine starts, there is no going back. Yesterday, I taught the last English class and left my job of thirty-two years. Five weeks earlier, A-Ma died of heartbreak, within days of my father’s sudden death. He was ninety-five, she ninety. Unlike A-Ba, who…
We’re newcomers to an old place. The house was built in 1860 (so we think); since then, the Portuguese fishermen and the faded, artsy bohemians have come and started now to go, replaced by “guppies” driving Lexuses. Our street is lined with lindens, home to chickadees that play in the elaborate display of whirligigs, birdbaths,…
I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close the door of summer behind them, their heads floating on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds, I saw their hips lay down inside those birds, inside the day…
With the leaping spirits we threw our voices past Three Kings to sea— eyes wide open with ancestors. We flew air and water, lifted by rainbows, whales, dolphins thrashing sharks into birthways of the sea’s labor: Rapanui born graven faced above the waves—umbilical stone; Tahiti born from waka: temple…
At the stained window, a morning jay. I stop my scissoring, as if I could reclaim a Santiago of bird-call and sudden ease, as if I could annul the battle-gray maze of gutting jails, courthouses, morgues— purgatory where I bend over the burlap, again and again, to show the world the smashed black bell of…
He lunged for the shut-off switch when he heard the scream. But the brutal five-inch teeth on the rotating drum, designed to excavate the coal face, had already destroyed helmet and hair, scalp and brain. Its rotation diminishing now, the carbide-tipped cutter bits dripping with the miner’s mistake. The noise declining as the massive drum,…
I used to think a poem could become a flower, a bear, or a house for a ravaged spirit. I used to think I understood what it meant to write a poem, and understood the impetus to write, and even knew a little something of the immensity of the source of poetry. I was never…
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