Poetry

Some years are lightas airyou don’t even have to lift themfrom your memorythey float their weightless goodiesin and out of your todaywith less fussthan a summer cloud roaming the sky but other yearsare heavy as a suitcase full of a murdered torsoheavier than plutonium or osmiumdarker than ten thousand leagues under the sea—you need the…

Can you believe I have cancer? Yosra asks,holding a mug of tea between her hands,her hair close to her scalp, almost laughing. I try to imagine the cancer auditioninginside her body, tiny translucent sliversof light weaving in and out and of her abdomenand uterus, traveling up and through her throat,needlepoints of light, fireworks fizzing down,…

Sometimes it’s tucked into itself,sewn up like the lips of a prisoner. After the procedure, the girls learnhow to walk again, mermaids with new legs,soft knees buckling under their new sinless bodies.Daughter is synonymous with traitor, the father says.If your mother survived it, you can. Cut, cut, cut. One girl exposes another girls’ secret, they…

Imperative:      to anchorin the present, stay alive to every now— the currency of beat and breathwith which you pay for every stolen step.      * Of sound:      a mortal music; sick,sweet drop and bounce.      * The boys we werebecoming something else. How we ripened through the back-and-forthand stretched to test the empty space above      * The connotation of…

There’s at least another being being you you may / may not have met. You know the theft and that free pass driving the already raging raging mad, scary as scarefest movies like by Stephen King when tombs thrust up from roiling mud in storms obligatory to the Big Reveal. But. No one sees them…

for Grace This is the shed against which you leantat the end of the field, the edge of the world—this, the darkness only half meantin which you feared that fear lay curled This is the crazy, rickety doorof the shed, blue as the summer skybut rough as the autumn sea on the shore,the door that…

When you collapsed the first timeat the dinner table, you fellnot like a hero in Homer, not likea great tree with a concussive thumpthat raises a dust cloud that blindsthe battling soldiers inside itso they can’t tell enemies from friends—but implodinglike a tall building shaken at its foundationthen crumbling as if made of spackle,as if…

Poetry WorkshopPrinceton, 1980 We had water fights at home,she said of the subject of homewhen it stuck its big headawkwardly into the roomand sat down. We others at the tablegazed at it, at her—this mousy senior who looked thirteenwith her pale frail body,bumps for breasts, and hair dull brown.She hadn’t said a word all term….

The worst thing that could happen did.She had a little girl who died.They took his parents while he hid.Your wife committed suicide. The guards raped him with a broom.He was beaten and left for dead.She woke to someone in the room.Then he was on her in the bed. The man seemed nice but he was…