a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hillsor someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a coldlobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrasethat explains everything and then you’re revokingyesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattanor you’ve just changed the name of your dreamboat and…
I took absence down to the ocean and becauseit is blind, I told it about the waves.I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my armsaround the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges.I walked beside absence in the streets at nightand I let it tell me stories. Child who is…
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…
At the front desk, Mamoru tells the receptionist that they are married. “Yes, my wife prefers darker colors. She would like one that’s dark blue or indigo,” he says, selecting the yukata that they will wear to dinner. Sachiko can hear him from where she sits in the lobby. The inn, Oyako Koto no Yume,…
translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra Nina Hansen’s on her way home and it’s been a long day. While she was researching and writing, she almost didn’t notice that buzzing in her ear. Her left ear. When she’s idle and alone, it feels as if a bumblebee’s sitting in there, the kind you find…
Every drip startles me: rain falling off the edge of mooninto the earth. Asleep next to a man who does not love meany more than he loves a river. I move to another room,closer to the rain without being touched. My brother sleeps (does he sleep?) in a rehab center in the Blue Ridge Mountains.I pray…
“Fire at a Brooklyn Warehouse Puts Private Lives on Display,”(1 Feb 2015, The New York Times) No lives were lost. Nothing was guttedbut the crumpling warehouse and its contents:medical forms, court transcripts, sonograms, bank checks. They’re like treasure maps,someone said of the half-charred scraps.But they weren’t. This was the opposite— it was as if the…
It’s 11:02.I was supposed to take the kids outside at 10:13.My underwear is over my head.I’m trying to sniff out the boy I once was,my private parts tiny and nutmeg.I didn’t give a shit about Superman.I was in love with Watergate.Watergate was my super hero.All that corruption. That darkness.Those men in black suits, greasy hair,…
This is the latching on. You are shelter and source, and this is the smell of only you. The hands that hold and lift and swaddle, the mouth that smiles and sings me, the eyes that look me into being: yours. This is the skin to skin. I cry to make the hungry stop and…
No products in the cart.