Nights turn a hairpin curve to dreams: I need to find our child a country or a name. I forget which. Jung remembered the smell of milk from his high chair, Woolf, red and purple flowers sprawled on her mother’s dress. A nun’s pink nose swoops towards me like a bird in my first recall….
And then there was the night, not long After my wife had left me and taken on the world- Destroying fact of a lover, and the city Roared in flames with it outside my window, I brought home a nice woman who had listened To me chant my epic woe for three Consecutive nights of…
—Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland, June 2000 Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant. Shirts on the clothesline sagged in rain. We burned turf, fists of earth blackening in the fireplace, room full of poets’ books leaning rumpled, half-asleep. All…
Annoyed with the parochialism of the “fantastic city” of St. Petersburg and close to the unexpected end of his life, Gogol escaped to Rome. He settled in a colony of Russian artists, shared lodgings with his bosom friend, the painter Alexander Ge. On their long walks they discovered “the inner meaning of everything.” Gogol, a…
Another day of hair in my food. Another day of being cheated, Overlooked. Another day of nausea. I play Beethoven: Symphony 9. The violin simmers for an instant, And the cello is the instant, And the timpani, The timpani comes crashing. My stomach turns its peach pit to the moon! The sound says I am…
Becomes a layer, means a look A tilt my skull to better Seesaw from this to back To finishing for a kiss To lean on the fall of your hair My thumb and forefinger Like the rain Pooling gain by plurality.
Don Lee, Yellow, stories: Eight short stories that offer a fresh, contemporary vision of what it means to be Asian in America, a post-immigrant examination of identity, race, and love. (Norton)
Once a whiff, once a flint, the shifty skystuff blinds me on five sides. I take icefuls of noise and gas rounding out an inside. I prepare the upper reaches by kissing distance back into my skull like a transparent worm. Smoke keeps returning a little freckled, so I use it too. Throw it up…
When kiss spells contradiction it spills an ocean of open clothes. I gave me to one who hung hearts so high it was a mast in mute blue weather, the clang and strop of it, the undercover wet. Said are they sails your impenetrables that only winds can jibe them, the arc and the rip…
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