Poetry

They say my great-uncle read foreign books in a mud house in Nanking, plowed his twenty acres, listened to rare birds, disobeyed the tides’ yes and no. One day he knelt in the street, sign around his neck that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax over him, even beech trees turned. He labored…

My father bars the door, bars harm From this house, and it is years. —Louise Glück, “Gretel in Darkness” I was fearless under the firmament, the starry dark my first education in freedom. It was my last. On the second night— when there were no guiding stones— it was clear: the expanse was a cold…

Into the clearing of . . . she climbed and stood up from the black boots of her blackouts into her body. The coat wept upon her shoulder, it hung upon her, a carcass heavy on a hook, and in the sockets of the buttonholes the buttons lolled and looked. As she climbed into that…

Climbing to retrieve my son’s ball in a neighbor’s yard, I caught my wedding ring on the fence and nearly ripped my finger off. Fifteen years ago, my wife’s name was engraved inside by a jeweler friend of my wife’s cousin in Zagreb. Blood spurted, as I desperately tried to unhook myself before I passed…

                                                          What gets out: I would be for you              like fog, those puddles of mist settling in the valleys    cars steer through nighttime,    mid-Pennsylvania, staking their slow headlights on           clouds nestled deep in the pits between mountains.   When your tongue wanders, dropping indiscreetly its lexicon, as a drunk lady ignores the slipping strap               of her…

I found my way back by grief scent and smoke to the daughter’s voice from the father’s mouth. This time you asked that I step outside my body though not far enough to fall into the abyss of night or near the flames that ringed the bed. I couldn’t say, “Go away” because the dead…

The child freestyles in the shower, battling yellow tiles with a steam-heavy tongue.                        Siblings can wait while s/he rhymes the hot water to an end. Braggadocio and bubblegum toothpaste blend, beatless. S/he spits and spits and spits until words harden like lime crust on the spray head. Have to get the neck into it—flexing…

Late dinner at a dark café blocks from Rittenhouse Square, iron pots of mussels and Belgian beer and a waiter eager to snag the check and clock out. Such are the summer pleasures of his work—winding down to a glass of red wine, catching the windowed reflection of a girl as she passes, counting the…

                     You will grow up to be a restless man with cold hands                      and a hard-to-reach heart                the gypsy woman told me                            as she opened my palm. I was seventeen then, my hands unmapped,                            my heart as inaccessible as Tibet.          A soap opera played soundlessly on the TV                in…