Poetry

Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…

When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…

May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…

What he hated most about family Was the depth and the duration Of the emotion, the delimiting Nest, net, and trap of it all… Ours was not a poor family, Caught in that single word poor, But ours was an ascetic family, Caught in that one word. We had our dignity. We had Books and…

A gas flare throbs, an ignition Urged out from the interlacing steel. Over the refinery, it hovers, So long as pipelines rush raw oil Thrilling through A circulating need, so long As a man must be propelled Forward & his engine filled. The burning occupies the black air Like a moth transfixed— Still living, fluttering,…

At Wellesley it was a henna-haired Swiss who had just come out, who, one night, when I was tracing a table of constellations, gathered enough courage to sit on my desk and tell me, I like women. She became an idol of that sisterhood, which meant she rarely came back to our room to sleep…

for Chris You make it and I wonder about it listening to what you navigate and sound in the midst of the orchestra with your clarinet enchanted—though you may not be—by what’s around, wrapping you in a cloak, complete or torn sometimes embroidered and elaborate, gold-edged while I peer down at you from a box…

What we have is shaped, layered, planned, like the twig of a bending sprout covered with earth so it can grow, the buds predicted by the shoot that we can see and understand, that we can seldom do without, that only we can ever know in all its style, within the root. Some want to…

The toothache drills a hole to the suitcase filled with singed clothes of the woman who died in a crash. Further inside, a shelf I made when I left my first country, plank I put myself on with my wooden doll and wooden dog.