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When I’m sick, I wish     whatever song is in my headwould stop. Tonight, it’s the same     tune my mother sangto tuck me in, its notes      the kind of kindness only distant trains still hit—soft     like a stringof Christmas lights sort-of      smiling from a darkenedwindow—the same tune     I took up, humming some, to steel myself against the fruit-likeodor shrouding      my…

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Having someone who knows that you fallasleep best on your stomach.And being unable to fall asleep because of him. Wondering: how much do you share,and how much keeps you apart? And in what way–as a tongue the edges of an envelope it would like to seal?As reticence divides good silence?As time…

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones You wrote to me about a tame pet hedgehogwho fell in love with a scrubbing brush. Shut inside four walls he’d found that special someonelike him and not like him, otherness and kinship. How hard he pattered around it before he understoodthat otherness has an advantage that cannot be overcome. And…

I’d hear a sound off in the treesand follow it for hours.I touched the bark of an old maple and watchedthe ants take my hand. Still in the front yardmy mamma is cleaning trout,like her life there is the gutting,the clipping of fins. I sliced my leg open on the fence leadingto this wildness, two…

I hope you’re glad I’d rather send youA letter by regular mail than a messageBeamed in an instant from screen to screen.To fold the pages twice and insert themInto an envelope seems to make themMore of a gift, to wrap them, to suggestI’ve chosen my words for you alone,The very person whose name I’ve written…

If I said, Your smile glows with empiricism.If I said, You are hydrogen, heliumed by the sun. If I said, You are both key and prison,claw and feather, absent hum. If I said, Your breath is opiate paradox.If I said, Your voice is thin as time. If I said, Your hands sweep through clotsof memory,…

What we remember most is our surprise. The gardener’s blood-thirstafter family was lost to the fight. Asters went unwatered except by rain. It may not have been prayer caught in our throatbut privilege, or cartilage, or birds. There are things we did not imagine: rooftops bloused in ruin;the enduring, flammable night. There are things that…