Poetry

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,…

As a child, as little more than an infant still learning numbers and words, I went to sleep after praying for uncles and aunts, for the living and the dead, with one hand in my mother’s hand through the bars of the cot, while I held in the other a bronze statuette of Mary given…

are tentative. Of course. To be an animal is to watch. Is to think about eating all the time. I watch them be so watchful. My window takes them one by one through trees winter strips down to a few species.                              When I saw the deer, I was beginning to type, not it came…

At the bend of the highway just past the beachside melon and papaya stands Past the gated entrance to the Kuilima Hotel on the point where Kubota once loved to fish, The canefields suddenly begin—a soft green ocean of tall grasses And waves of wind rolling through them all the way to the Ko‘olau, a…

Color of a two-day new bruise, pored and faintly fuzzed like the pad of a dog’s paw. Skin so thin faucet water risks rubbing through to moony fruit, the shape and pitless-centered weight of testes.             No stone, too malleable             so, not a drupe. Dropped, it wobbles to find plumb center, comes to rest on star-shaped…

“There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.” —Edward Abbey The horizon gutted, skinned, unfurled and dried like a diamondback, no secrets, no secret sea cave stash, so evident it all seems invisible: fissures in the orange San Andreas, smoking asphalt on a runaway go-cart, 100% clear…

A hairy hand with mouth and eyes,       I would say, and was that scuttling, that side-stepping jig, the furred upper legs bent at the joint in demi-plié, was it       scurry or whisk, romance or menace, this tuft half-hid behind our garden shed door? Her dragline ensnarls like a gossamer kiss       to my thinking, she’s thinking,…