Poetry

(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s evermet, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.) I said     I’m dead you put blanketson my iron lung    said Must be cold    you’realways cold    Dead I said again   you saidThat won’t stop youfrom stealing…

What a name to call your sister—Nada:Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish,where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds                of the way to Nathalie where, in French,               the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth,               the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the wordcontagious, even Mom fizzing laughteras she said, “Don’t call your…

as the voice inside the telephonemade crying soundsor allergy sounds. It was that time of year—             the particle count highand already a shortageof rental cars and we were all desperateto vacate the premiseswhile you had already done so.                          Standing between the voiceand my selfat the center of ourweather     hovering acrossthe outlandish girthof America and twenty years…

If description is a living thing, dark cherry hair and glass eyes, tilted away—I want to say something that will look at me. If to memorize is to adore and cannot afford distraction or a socket neck that rotates the head  away,  if  death  is  turning  away, with long  brown  human  hair,  revolving  like  a globe,  from …

in terms ofdesign onebox is coloredorange the one you wantedalways is andsits in the bathroomof anyone’shouse causethat’s whatshe wantsit’s choosingthat wakes thingsup I wondered howlong allthat I needed and encounteredherewould come like a wavenot the shakebut the aftereffectsand this boxdid saythere was a wayto see thisthinga-loneJuly calledit calculuswhat iscomes in boxeswhat is notcomes in wavesthe…

Everything recedes With such grand effort. A morsel On the winter palace floor. In the trees Up ahead, a light goes out, asleep In her summer arms. Hate is born As a monument to our inattention and the blind Greed of disbelief. Even the heroin addict has more Conviction, morbidly patient with his addiction. Work,…

It is so and so and not the dusty worldwho drops. It is their mother and not the dusty worldwho drops them. Why I imagine her so oftenempty-handed as houseboats’ distant lightsrise and fall on the far ripples—I do not know. I know that darkness.Have stood on that bridgein the space between the streetlightsdizzy with…

but don’t read this poem whose title implies I think you’re old but youare at least older than me time passing makes everyone old unlessdeath and I don’t want that which is not to say I’m terrified but don’tnot read this poem because you’ve died! I’d rather insult you what Imean is—oh look! I think…

César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday April 15, 1938 It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you. Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too. No doubt Juana Vasquez was killed. The killers, poor also, were skilled. And Emilio, they shot him, in the back of the neck, after they made…