Poetry

Something in this long commute is chilling. The street between Karlin and Nessen City’s broken, carnage is literal and fresh: raccoon, a deer new since yesterday, crow, loose feathers desultory in the jet stream of a car. This afternoon a mallard looks more human in death than he ever did bobbing on a pond: face-down,…

The brown boy hits me, but says he is sorry. The brown girl, his sister, says it’s because he likes me. I say, Yuk! He likes me? Well, I hate him. The black girl pinches me and says, Scaredy-cat, tattletale, little pussy . . . I dare you to hit back. The white girl grabs…

Where any of us is going in tomorrow’s reckless Lexus is the elemental mystery: despite instructions he left behind, Houdin- i, who could outwit ropes and chains, padlocks and steam- er trunks, could extricate himself from underwater metal crates, could send forth, he was certain, a message from the other side, never cracked the curtain…

The souls we carry hunger for our light. They who feel unfortunate, close in on the fields, convene around happiness. They hear the sound of it like laughter, on roads, through rain-blurred trees, the smell of it boiled through bones and cartilage, the taste of earth deep and darkly rooted. Drawn to those sleeping skin…

In my little museum of erotica I would place your feet. I would place your feet sandwiching my feet. Their softness. Their heat. And I would place your arms as you do mornings, beneath my neck. around my waist, tugging me towards you, my back to your chest. This well-beingness I would set on a…

translated by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes   No matter how much he pondered the Virgin’s pregnancy, how much his thoughts went back and forth, his heart and troubled soul couldn’t figure it out. —traditional Filipino verse narrative of the life and death of Christ   Chisel, plane, and hammer, to you I’ll whisper my bitter…

Arturo stomps the heel of his boot and tells me: Every pinche minute I mess up a red ant. That’s no good, I tell him, me the young man in the next row, The shadow of my hoe cutting weeds in Boswell’s beet field. Arturo says: every super pinche half-hour I see this squirrel spin…

Well we did our best in deracinated weather. Daughters were wedding daughters, suddenly. They’d registered at Bed Bath & Beyond. Rain-hurled catalpa flowers bruised the yard. The dual-mothered bride procured a dress, to her surprise. Pert cannabis jungled up. One wandered under oaks, umbrella’d to the hilt, like some female in a lyric or a…

The powerlessness of sleep to transport two men along a sand-blown road. The shrapnel keeps popping out of their bodies and the Humvee keeps crashing into the guardrail. The escarpment fills in with blood. The lieutenant rides shotgun, fallow with the land. He notices the flamingo thin stems of the frangipani, shredded in wind, unstitchable….