Poetry

1 The girl who martyred her dolls, sending them To heaven to wait for her arrival, Sentenced them to stones or fire or the force Of her hands to tear them, methods she’d learned From the serious, dark nuns who taught her. She would press a pillow over my face To encourage sainthood. “Now,” she…

Starts in estuary                   whelm and whirl of rock-skin,          sea-swell, the hove called salt.                            I loved the hero-to-be,                            his life first arrowed unto me,                                     scudding, spared, still                                     unconscious.                            No                                     he and she to wash                   away yet, my inhale planked to his ex—.                            Plus our everywhere wet…

The way, at last, a sloop goes sailorless and bobs at the dock, swathed in darkness, the way waves swell and, swelling, slay themselves— water, whatever you want, I want to want that. A nickel’s in the till, then it’s not, it’s in a pocket, forgotten, and the pocket’s in a laundry chute. A puddle’s…

The song of someone like me begins on the penny whistle. A few notes, just a few, up and down. The bass line comes in, then the lead and second guitar. Brushstrokes on the snares. And then the singer, Lord, then the singer steps up. What voice could slip this backdrop? Only the rise and…

If memory were easy, I wouldn’t care for it: Not the poorest truth, the hard-won winter Darling, without a single trick of light or Cloud light-burred and blurred for light green Air to play on. Worse the flirty silliness: The soft, lost summer lies. The hedonist Inheritance: Pressed like a nymph to faun On flesh…

“Everything changes but the avant-garde.” —Paul Valéry A few words are left us from the beginning. Thank you, God, for allowing me a little to think again this morning. Touch my face, touch this scarred heart. Here, touch this upturned face as wind as light. So they labored for three or four decades to turn…

In a time zone all our own, we were a bubble of the past, a cleanser upon the last sentence of history. Lazing through tangled medieval lanes we offered everyone a do-over, a mulligan, and as time flowed backwards to greet us we imagined the world transformed— gashes were healed by knives, seatbelts were remembered,…

translated by Laura Rocha Nakazawa That night, the wind was a lament, a daring wound above the voice of the sea. That night, someone called me amid deep darkness to take me to the Melah, the Jewish quarter. Inebriated, I walked, covered in white tulles to protect me from the fine and savage sand. Alone,…

We melt the old thing into the new thing. Tongs, a ladle the size of a man’s head I fill with thoughts of molten steel. Fire below the cauldron, in our cigarettes, in the right hand of the man coming back from the bathroom with his skin mag. He’d tell me, were I to ask,…