Someone else died again,and when I heard, I feltthe green oceanlike a suffocating quiltpulled over me. I had a fatheronce with a heroinneedle in his arm. So what am Icapable of? I’d rather flipa book open than attend a party,feel my numbedfingertips in the cold and neveragain hear my sister’s voiceecho, “Joel killed himselflast night.”…
“Nature’s Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d’hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal…Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly?” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Don’t sit too close, the smellof her…
A brick warehouse, a cold morning,and Newark in the distance. Bleakis how I take my coffee, insidea shipping container while a planecranks by. Thinking something about “the bloom of youth” somethingI’ve lost something a manwould feel right saying but which sitsunder my tongue, unwanted pill. I do take the bitter train throughNew Jersey but this…
Remember the night it snowed in a place we were told would never snow and like two shadows cast by a lamp standing in the presence of a Greater we walked the beach the sand’s grit limpid the expanse of what I didn’t know endlessly swallowing the floes the ocean has always been immutable and dumb has always carried on past my limitations…
Laughing at the thought of lackof pleasure as a pleasure—monuments not yet objects,a waltz not for dancing but for labor— and having slogged through pollen,considerable weeds and fallenpower lines to be here, I have moreto say about this day than of the year. Blasphemy’s part of the Logos too,like wanting the light my way. Towersdisappear…
In the beginning, there was the lattice work of the body.You climbed me the way a cat… [wait, let me start over] In the lattice work of the body, we began.You climbed inside me. Fixed there like aneye in a socket. You saw everything: …
The Forever Rachel chiseled into a tree and many years laterwritten in the water of a pond.Forever Rachel in her mesh hikers, steppingover a sleeping policeman.Hair under her arms. Hair on her legs.Wielding a picket sign every other day.She made her prom dress out of old newspapersand during graduation walkeddown the aisle barefoot forever Rachel,chuckling…
Translated by Andrew Wachtel I walked ahead, there was no other path.Doors cut us off from the past: mama was aging,the tree burned up, and something was wrongwith the sick man’s chest.Everywhere I went a beggar woman followed,with a belly bloated like a globe,but she didn’t ask for cash or to sing a song.Like some kind…
Bunsen burners click on, throats closed for a safe flame. The roomtepefies—pipettes veiled in thin fog. Litmus paper drops like sleeveson a dress. Every girl measures: reds, blues, acid, acid, base. Someboys huddle around the fire, burn the edge of our assignment, laughat how an eraser cooks in the blaze. I’m tired of the slow…
No products in the cart.