translated by Phil Metres This drilling rig lies in the forest tundra. One rises on command, sleeps ears cocked, and waits for the cry “All hands on deck!” at an untimely hour, mindless of the weather. It snows here—but it’s summer in the States, and I’m free to conceive in futile ways what you eat…
Sunday. The bells, as expected. I cannot help it if I rise, if finding the room too fraught with light—all of it, the white walls, the rinsed notion (always almost inside then just out of reach) of God, your body gleaming in sleep where the sun falls on it and away from, falls on and…
for Margaret At the edge of a river and the end of a road, a blue-eyed boy lived with his mother and five sisters. The women sewed wedding gowns for every girl from every town. But not one of the river woman’s daughters made a dress for herself. They were too plain, too fat, too…
Contributor Spotlight Growing up in Fall River, Massachusetts, David Rivard had been forced to copy patriotic verse on the blackboard during detention, and until he was well into college, he continued to regard poetry as a punitive activity. Certainly he never imagined that he himself would become a poet — one whose books have racked…
Its gauze tent Is big as a heart or hand, Filthy with dots like black sand. These are its seeds, eggs, which in gooey, Furred translucency have already sucked in Twigs and leaves as good as dead, And will turn into striped, Puffy, segmented worms, Whiskered and spotted zinc, Umber and crimson. The tent’s tissue…
In the room in Mexico where they finally reunited, Bird knelt by the bed, Kin lay on it as he’d done for weeks, and JJ settled into the canvas butterfly chair at its foot. Bird often knelt by Kin’s bed these days, as if praying-which she also often did these days, though not on her…
I am praying again, God—pale God— here, between white sky and snow, by the larch I planted last spring, with one branch broken at the elbow. I pick it up, wave winter away: I do things like that, call the bluebirds back, throwing yarn and straw in the meadow, and they do…
It was born white. It lay in bed Between its father and mother Kicking its tiny feet, so pretty You wanted to suck them and all their piggies. The mother kept looking nervously at the father, Hoping the little lie made him happier. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “It’s you I love. The…
In 1969, except for the yearly wardrobe changes of the young officers’ wives, Randolph Air Force Base had barely acknowledged the decade. The young officers discussed shoeshines, the laundry that put the sharpest crease in their everyday khakis, which colonel gave the best TDY. Friday afternoons the wives met them at the Officers Club. The…
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