Returning home to grade five now to Mister Blackwood’s jockey pointer and Mistress Sommerville’s short fingers— their long lessons beneath that mammoth guango tree; to hoppers popping and squirting from grass—our own green- and-brown bubbly; and the dominick fowls coupling nearby. I return now to our cricket pitch, fresh-pressed like cloth, and creased with chalk;…
Ain’t no way this river or any other is wide enough to slow us down, no bust-gut half-ass ocean got the means nor the notion to make this anything but fine— why bother to slip on or out of that little bit of nevermind tonight cause it don’t matter none to rhythm and blues…
translated by Khaled Mattawa I knelt to tie my shoes in the frost and heard the rattle of an Indian’s throat or maybe the groan of an animal led to slaughter I imagined men bearing their weapons extinct since The Fifth Article of the Bill of Rights was recited since all applauded it and…
It flew in through the kitchen window that summer a few years after the war, the year I turned four or five, that fragile yellow bird Made In Japan whose insides had been sucked out when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. All it required for nourishment was the sweet, cold water I poured into the…
In the photograph of Billie Holiday taken by Mickey Pallas at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, she wears a low-cut evening gown & a fawn-colored stole. Her rhinestone earrings are shoulder-dusters, & her necklace falls almost to her cleavage in heavy leaves of glass stones, or maybe they are real (though paste gems on Billie…
After I flung you down at last onto the bed because it was two a.m. and you’d been crying for hours, it seemed, and would not stop, all my comforting defeated, spent; because you were too frantic by then to say what it was you wanted, sobbing too much to say it, though you kept…
Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth, a play: Dove’s adaptation of Oedipus to a Southern plantation in 1840 premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this past summer, and this second edition reflects major changes made to the script as it was brought to the stage. (Story Line)
When you shut your eyes to daydream, you’re really imagining the face of God, who, in the fifties, assumed the face of Mrs. Oshkenozi, who sat in her apartment window handing glasses of tap water to boys in pursuit of perfect stickball. Grandpa & his compatriots puffed unfiltered Camels & flirted with imperfect hands of…
The first one was in Michigan and I loved him like I was digging in a foreign land and he was the ruin I came to discover. Michigan is as cold as people imagine and when I remember him now he is leaned against one of those gaudy American cars, big…
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