translated by George Evans and the author I love this body that’s lived through life, its amphora shape, its water smoothness, its streaming hair that crowns the skull, the delicate stem of its crystal face ascending exquisitely from shoulders and collarbones. I love my back sprayed with muted bright stars, my translucent hills, wellsprings of…
You are blessed in life, she says, touching a match to a single spicy balsamic leaf, but if you do not change your direction, you will end up where you’re going. On her kitchen counter laboratory, Ah-Pauh simmers sweet oil from parasitic trees. She asks the thousand-armed goddess to throw protection over me—small fish my…
Now they lug in eggplant, zucchini peppers, honey, apples, cheese the college jazz band snakes through slide trombone punching October blue snare snipping away the seconds. Above, the golden dome, a manmade sun and atop, “Wisconsin,” a golden woman. Children roll on the Capitol lawn leaves litter their clothes, hair while parents slip loaves and…
Yusef Komunyakaa speaks in a gravelly Southern baritone, tinged with a Cajun flavor that reflects his childhood years in Louisiana. He is a man who chooses his words carefully, splicing his speech with long silences, until his conversation resembles something close to a jazz riff — very fitting for this acclaimed poet who says “oral…
1. Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city, I’m going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit Out of an…
Mama’s eyes are turning to clouds, she forgets the way to the grocery store, broccoli rots inside the bread box. Some days she does not know me, these shoulders she’s sponged in the river, the baby hands she taught to hold water. Unpinning her cinnamon-roll plaits, she’s chasing light-bugs for diamonds and playing pity-pat with…
Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan, The Language of Names: What We’re Called and Why It Matters, nonfiction: Bernays and Kaplan present a fascinating and very readable account of names and naming in contemporary society, touching on class structure, ethnic and religious practices, manners, and everyday life. (Simon & Schuster)
Because we cannot be together we live in six notes of Vietnamese where no one can understand us except those who speak in tongues and the language of birds Because we cannot be together we boil the root of the telephone cords torn from the black soils of sleep hold negatives up to the light…
for Chris I’m a penny fallen from heaven’s corner pocket, anybody’s overcoat, pick me up and I’ll bring you all kinds of luck. I’m a fence burning down, love locked in a box, I’m a map of hand-me-down tomorrows, the last but one, or anywhere you never wanted to go, but now. I’m a clock…
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