Years ago, I went to a family reunion in rural Sweden, where the houses are red, yellow, or white, and the mailboxes bear the family’s last name. My grandfather was born Birger Johansson, but because the farmers on either side of his family’s farm were also named “Johansson,” Birger’s family decided to change their surname….
Tanks run over the castle of my childhood in December. On our black-and-white TV I see the riot police shields and truncheons. Vinegar is the only thing you can buy in the stores. Telephones turn into toys. Because of a curfew, my father’s bedtime stories grow longer than ivy and wilder than calendula. Restless…
The following piece has been adapted from the author’s biography of Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (2016). Lola Ridge slipped under the ropes and started straight for the cordon of mounted police and the prison doors. A young mounted guard, a boy, rode down upon her. As…
When the pilot calls it rough air, I think of a cat’s tongue, as if the air itself were textured, as if we could feel its sandpaper licking our skin. I swallow my ears open, and the silence which is not silence at all fills them. In the absence of faith I resort to magical…
sometimes I’m issued a new head and the old one drops off and then I see the new one isn’t new it’s a used head, sometimes a bit moldy or flushed with rage, this head filled with notes on what is wrong with the world or carrying a list of expendables or groceries a head…
A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave. It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holiday in the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the other the same plus chestnut spots, drift above white-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richness to the situation, paralleling the stinks and…
a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hills or someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a cold lobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrase that explains everything and then you’re revoking yesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattan or you’ve just changed the…
I took absence down to the ocean and because it is blind, I told it about the waves. I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my arms around the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges. I walked beside absence in the streets at night and I let it tell…
Somehow, Benzy hadn’t become a rabbi. He wished it were more complex than that, but it was not. He lived in his parents’ windowless basement in a Crown Heights brownstone that, if it did have windows, would have faced one of the biggest yeshivas in the neighborhood, which was basically a rabbi factory. Benzy had…
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