Poetry

—for Bei Dao Lost, but for the flames we drag through dark streets; smoke and dust Aho je la, aho je la, aho jengeje, aho jengeje This chant is sky orotund with sun and the mirage: a pot smoldering against night’s face, startling last year’s spirits gathering in corners, holding on. And this—The crackle of…

When the hook-and-ladder truck took the corner far too fast, on two wheels, say witnesses, for 70 feet, and then went over, screaming on its side for 90 more, my friend, the reference librarian, was in the back of the truck, knocking around like an overripe peach in a coffee can thrown down thirteen stairs;…

For what it’s worth, once I left the convent, but I never left the Church. It’s true, I left Ireland in a hurry, too. You could say I broke the habit, or to quote my da’ “I pulled a rabbit out o’ my arse” and realized I put the cart before the horse and wasn’t…

Bruno came up to the girl at the bar and she was already talking halfway out of one side of her mouth while, he knew it, looking at him with one eye at least through the smoke she dropped everywhere from the chatted cigarette and the pointed nails, and he knew it was all falling…

Loss and ruin grind under our feet like spilled salt, bad luck sticking to our soles. And joy streaks across the sky, a star burning out. Who knows what will save us? A man yanks the hair of a woman he once covered with kisses. Each kiss was a blossom and he thought he was…

Here are boys, still weak. When they speak                                                                   snow falls from their lips. Pale of hand and cheek, the motors that whirred in their chests have failed. + Their new city—buildings like a scrim                                                                  a god unfurled for them so it waves in the wind. + Lovely, strange, and chill. The boys are…

The heart of the builder the wild talent, the so-called genius of the artist is largely overrated. He has been building walls for 60 years now. Two things are important. Endurance (Strength is useful but overrated; leverage can accomplish at least as much as the imprecision of brute force), and material, the second thing, even…

When I was a Jersey girl I hid my Jersey ways. Predictable as milk, I paled predictably when New Yorkers said: Jersey? and they were right. They despised my yellow Jersey plates, my Garden State cockeyed, solipsistic, anesthetized take on pig farming in that isolate, Secaucus, my bowling with extended family at the Elizabeth Lanes—…

To the locusts that blur the tiny lyres of their shells, I leave my blindness at the end of day. To the distant whistle of the train at dusk, I leave the smoke in a girl’s hair. To days I dipped my body in, I leave my only shadow. To the gravel road that crackles…