Poetry

  • The Earth

    translated from the French by Anne Atik Small crystal globe, Earth’s small globe, Through you I see My lovely glass bowl. We’re all locked up In your hard strict breast But so polished, so glossed Rounded by light. Like this horse running Or a lady who halts Or the flower on her dress A child…

  • The Man at the End of My Name

    My mother, given one name, exchanged it for another—Cohen for Carlan, less “Jewish”— and then for my father’s, whose Edelman had lost its E during the war for “business reasons.” What’s in a name? A Rosenblum without the blum would still a Rosen be. And what about me— Girl who met Goy, and gave away…

  • But in the Onset Come

    Where is it, the semaphore branch or bellwether sounding a trail over hill, dale, parking lot . . . leaves down, birds vanished, only a left-over tic and shiver while overhead roar the test flights, free-fall shadows stippling the defunct garden thick with invasives, those exogamous brides. I ask for bread, someone hands me a…

  • The Dead Girls

    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…

  • Thetis on Achilles, The Son

    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…

  • Love, or Something

    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…

  • Anywhere Elsewhere

    How anyone is happy in this country I don’t know. Any way you turn there is an edge, and everyone cocks a wind-burned hand over the brow to look out under it. The water flings petticoats of foam against wolf-headed rocks, and multicolored boats moored among others to the weathered pier bob dumb as soldiers….

  • Brownfield Sonnets

    1. Hay What’s the Latin word for hayfield? Virgil’s mum in his instructive Georgics, though my neighbors talk of nothing but: how weeks of cool rain forced the upright grass— seed ready to burst from fuzzy heads too wet to cut, releasing to the wind goodness that should be stuffed above a stall, or pulled…