Poetry

A gray row of corrugated huts hunkering down in rain. Across the way the fire burns night and day though unseen in sun light. Bernard wakens to the aroma of warming milk and burned coffee. Later we’ll say he had the bearing of an angel with clear eyes, a wide brow, thick golden curls. His…

ALBA 1 8 a.m. and we punch outand leave the place to our betters.2,000 miles and fifty yearslater and at my back I alwayshear Chevy Gear & Axlegrinding the day shift workersinto antiquity. ALBA 2          The river works.No one flips a switch, no oneshouts “Ready Set Go!” no onewrites a memo,…

Sad jar of atoms, I say when Jacqui cuts her thumb instead of a cucumberor returns from her run wet as a dog. Sad jar yourself, she says after acop clocks me doing 45 in a school zone. This is called borrowing aByronic phrase describing life and attaching it to your beloved. We’vetried other terms…

She is crushing on a younger guy after many conversations aboutthings like the brain’s musical notations or quinoa recipes. Hisround face, wire rims almost ubiquitous, every young man at workkind of looks like that. She tells her husband about the crush, hethinks it’s probably good for her. When she talks to her crush sheforgets to…

Because my grandmother is deadbut because when she lived she favored this place,I too have crossed the rutted roadand come to Mohanraj Jewellers.At seven on a Sunday evening I could wire cash or purchase rubies.I could change my dollars for a packet of bills the size of a grown      man’s shoe—enough to buy shoes for…

Everything’s a window the professor told my class,and I thought about breaking that glass, or shuttingthe curtains, or better yet opening those windowsand climbing out into the snowy world beyond.He said fashioning windows is the only waywe can make sense of what we see, so evenas I walked off through that snow I must have…

My mother started writing essays in English,essays with wrong punctuation, wrong tenses,wrong spacing wrong spelling,with Arabic terms too, typed in English(and a French accent)when she cannot findthe translation for…mina.In her e-mail she tells me she’s very “exited” about this—her American teacher loves her ideas,even in her bad English.Their topic this week is “Now and Then,”the…

Somewhere there is order,a multiverse of order.I could havesewed that rip in the liningwith special strong thread,washed pillows for the refugees,cut new gardenias to replacethe yellowed blouses collapsedin the vase, called someone,hoping they’d be happyto hear from me. I could have faced the hard timewith the fortitude of my tribe,planted elephant garlic,loved you through this…

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboatcomes slowly out and then goes back is truly worthall the years of sorrow that are to come.                         —Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” I’m here, listening to the sound of oarsdipping and dripping while they pull across the sound,and, it’s true,…