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  • Berenice Abbott’s New York

    Is it a vanishing point or is it      Brooklyn into which the cables run      Brooklyn over which these two      these shadowy walkers come      against the shaded rails against      the future in the arcades in the bridge      the parallels above them in midair                                     § Under a clatter of fire…

  • Run Away, My Pale Love

    This was just before my thirtieth birthday. I was in graduate school, of all places. I had no idea why. None of us did. We were extremely well-spoken rubber duckies. You could push us in any one direction, and we would flounder on forever. Sometimes, in the drowsy winter hallways, my conscience would rear up…

  • Goldsboro Narrative #45

    The whites and the blacks are still newcomers. You can tell: the way we claim flags, that we fight. The other nomads were moved on, learning that land does not love humans and is not at home with us, even when it lets us grow ourselves food, even when it lets us house our dead….

  • Self-Portrait in Summer

    The day threatens its hold over me, the storm closes in on the lake though I’ve heard it before, we’ve begun with the moon. Plainly stated with my silver pen: I wait for the day to fill me, to make its choice. I spin myself smaller; listen, I will not tell everything. With eating comes…

  • Trash Traders

    That’s how it starts, with the trash. Someone is swapping the trash, silently and insidiously, all over town. On the Promenade des Aubes, the rich lift the lids of their silvery pails and find used Pampers stuffed into empty boxes of Hamburger Helper; well-bred aunts hold up low-watt bulbs and shake them gingerly, as if…

  • Going to Hear My Child’s Heartbeat for the First Time–Part 2

    it’s the girl in deep water who will not drown           (drum) come down (drum) come down           (drum) zora’s instrument hidden in the belly (drum) carried across the atlantic           (drum) it’s a mystery to master (drum) it don’t stop           (drum) don’t stop (drum) gotta story to tell           (drum) won’t stop (drum)…

  • Native Sandstone

    There was no house yet, just a wellhead where the house would be, under an overturned box to keep the sand out. Clay was building the house, and it would be one to live in for a long time, so they were trying to get everything right. From the passenger seat, Susan watched him wedge…

  • Familiarity

    Teenagers for sure, one black, one white, so when did they have that terrified, high-pigtailed child? in yellow and pink, screaming Mommy, Mommy, at Sherman and Walden as I bike through. The boy stands in the street, you’d say irresolute, but his (good-looking) face is calm. As if I were the child I see the…

  • Grass

    San Antonio, Florida They don’t mow on Sundays in San Antonio. They keep the seventh day for Paz and Neruda, for Simic angels whose wings are made of smoke. And they walk their dogs softly in the morning, so they will not miss the smallest utterance of Whitman or of John Clare, who pace the…