Article

                        and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking…

What a strange time it is. Princess Diana dies. (Not even sure if she’s a real princess although stupidly she was called the people’s princess.) Then Mother Theresa dies. In honor of Diana. (?) Maybe to appease God, maybe to apologize. Then Ted Turner gives a billion dollars (sort of) to the UN. With strings….

Back when I used to be Indian I am leaning into the shadows, my shoulder against the rough mud and log wall. The old woman’s fingers mumble down the length of her black rosary, her head haloed against the chimney of a kerosene lamp. In his box, resting across two weathered sawhorses, Uncle Big Tooth…

You are the hero of this poem, the one who leans into the night and shoulders the stars, smoking a cigarette you’ve sworn is your last before reeling the children into bed. Or you’re the last worker on the line, lifting labeled crates onto the dock, brown arms bare to the elbow, your shirt smelling…

Washington, D.C. The cabdriver from Sierra Leone, who missed his home, but doubted he would ever go back, maneuvered the car on its bald tires in the snow and slush like a fish through the sparse traffic from Washington Circle to the Museum of Natural History. The people in charge of my country, he said,…

for Mick Vranich   Back when I used to be Indian I am sitting in a booth in a late night café, Chicago draped around me like anxious, wasted breath. Across the shiny tabletop Raven leans toward his coffee, wrapping the white cup with long fingers hardened from bending over sawhorses and hammering guitars. Music…

Corolla, the part composed of petals. Corymb, the flat-topped, vague inflorescence opened first. Flower, array of fertile and sterile leaves forming the reproductive fabric of angiosperms, my friend, the botanist, says, a line inserted in her chest below the breast, through a cleft and fixed to a pump she calls Marion, after her doctor. Marion…

Back when I used to be Indian I am stretched out beneath her, the thin white curtains waving like wings above our bed. The drowsy bird of me unfolds into her hands. She grins, crawls over me, shakes her head. The long, black feathers of her hair fall between my teeth as I rise into…