When finishing graduate school at Harvard, Manny Chokra met with instant and astonishing success. At the age of twenty-six, quite by chance, he made two new discoveries in the field of neurological physiology, and though his dissertation was barely complete, universities all over the country were offering him jobs. Manny accepted a tenure-track position at…
These ruins reach to sea, continue right through surf. This harbor long-disused, once frenetic, is famous for anchors atilt, hooks to snare more of those hulls that loll in sea floor's vast litter. Right over this wreckage sailed those off for Gallipoli, boys of good cheer. Today all's calm and we picnic out on a…
In a paint-speckled smock Monika is cutting cheese, her short, sparrow-colored hair falling forward. From the barn kitchen window, she doesn't see the owl on a branch turning its head side to side. Gazing at the wall, she considers the line between figurative and real. the willed silences of art. She wants distilled meanings and…
The Streets Are Flowing Rivers The blacks on McCullough Street, Druid Hill Avenue and Linden Avenue were people of the Depression in Prohibition neighborhoods that Jean Toomer called "the Preacher-Driven Race"-faces that have all faded, all gone now with a quiet dignity, who on many a Sunday morning sang "My Lord What a Morning" and…
for Camilo Pérez-Bustillo The books traveled with Camilo everywhere, like wrinkled duendes whispering advice. The fortune-teller clawed his palm and warned him about El Salvador, where the guards search for books at the border, plucking at pages like the pockets of a bearded subversive. The books were bandits, bootlegging illicit words like Che and insurrection….
A dog's bark breaks the December ten-degree weather, a bitter dark space bleaching into a voweled ache that staccatos the thin wind, fuzzes into consciousness as a hurt. A cry ballooning in the surface of things, it's like the residue of city air left in the lung, while you search these suspenseful streets— the houses,…
After the protests began, I started running on the beach. I went up every day after work, took off my long sleeves and concealing skirts, slid into nylon shorts and a tanktop. Then I ran. Two kilometers north along the curve of the beach, followed by a swim in the warm, enervating sea. The run…
The chair breathes for hours. Off in another country, a waiter yells at me—You can't save anyone you can only save food. Plastic bags for dogs. Here's my friend at last back from the bathroom. He breathes like a chair. Save me, for I am green fruit, it is raining, and I shall fall too…
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989 No one asks where I am from, I must be from the country of janitors, I have always mopped this floor. Honduras, you are a squatter's camp outside the city of their understanding. No one can speak my name, I host the fiesta of the bathroom, stirring the toilet like a punch…
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