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  • Cultural Revolution

    Humpbacks in journey rendered,          in Eastern Australian watersan Indian Ocean air. How pleading           tones jump across continents intorivers of sound scientists call non-          human revolution, perplexes. Perhaps a singer lost course and migrated          east from Antarctic feeding grounds.Did whitecaps trick or force; before           he forged a life worth its music? Hisvoice haunts night-oceans in silver;          intones his own dialect…

  • Ars Poetica

    In my Fresno, there are no prerequisites,just a frontage road inside the fence floppedto the west. The cover charge for a poetic identityis delegitimized alongside white aesthetics—between the rows welting the earth’s still dustlike corduroy.                                                   On one side, almond trees, pistachios.Fieldworker housing spray-painted with ads.The fervent recall of history from poets in the traditionhover in…

  • Hover

    1. A splinter driftsthrough a soot-slathered sun ray,its light: blue in orange orthat orange glowing. Beside the fence’s sunlit face,wrapped in a calico quilt,my head tilts and I seepressed into tire treada snow-nibbled leaf. Nine years afloat,the sky, dressed as water,neighs at headlightsthrummed awakewhen Coyote’s teethjewels the mesa’s rim. 2. I turn to my left…

  • The Gift

    You can tell whether a bird has a mateif there are pinfeathers on its head, new feathersthat start out as stubs full of blood then enshroudthemselves in a white scaly coat as they grow.Preening releases the feather, but a bird can’t reachthe top of its own head. A mate, a friend, or childpreens that spot,…

  • Some of You

    Some of you walked as though you were walking on coals of fire. Some of you as though in the field of arboles you remembered from when you were younger, when your fathers taught you how to pull the chilis from the stem, though there were no stems and you were on lookout for other…

  • Hello

    I, a deaf man, thankhearing aidsfor not working,How many insults I did not hear! in full mystery ofpersonhood Itoe, naked,                    talking to you, God, since I am afraid to find myself alone. I now have 24 hours 00 secondsbeforetwo menshove my cooling body into an ambulance van —I know a death that can be explained is…

  • Big Sister

    Tongues started wagging after Nazan Abla, our next-door neighbor’s daughter, was hospitalized for a week. I heard her mother tell my mother through the kitchen window that she had a bleeding ulcer. But the real gossip started after her hospital stay. In the year that followed, she broke up with her fiancé, took a job…

  • Doing Good and Making Trouble: A Look at Helen Hunt Jackson

    Every spring since 1923, thousands of playgoers have attended an open-air performance known as the Ramona Pageant in the San Jacinto foothills near Hemet, California. Mexican music echoes throughout the natural amphitheater as Native Americans dance and chant, the US cavalry charges in, and Franciscan priests pray for them all. Nearly 400 costumed volunteers enact…