Poetry

I need you to get me a ticket, he said. For what, I asked, waking at the foot of his bed. For the train, he said. They say I need a ticket. Except for the small lamp the room was dark. The air was cool and clear. The first night of September. Do you know…

translated from the Greek by Stratis Haviaras & Dana Bonstrom On a wager one journeys alone, else There is neither journey nor wager. Passepartout, your name spoke for itself but beneath lay contempt and coercion. Loyalty? What loyalty? Till when? And why? What of yours was at risk? Would I win the wager you’d doubtless…

A circle of young: vicious. A circle of young: smells like sugar. A circle of young: why such organization?                               Around what? Around how? And into the circle is assimilation. Meaning: The girl with blue eyes is a foreigner. Xenophobic is a fawning. It smells delicious, of lavender and his mother: He slept with her….

There is no further trace of the painter and wall this house out of heathen legend. Her feet in our boat. In a green meadow I saw madness. Were singing. There is a word which means dark or blue or the black stream. Having spent years there darkening mountains—sea-caved and frayed. Walk before me still…

Chitchat—an amalgamated moan. Pisswarm Zywiec at a table of crumbs. Beneath the pine-white floor pertains To the barman flipping cassettes. Real worms articulate our options Through darkly blistering earth— From bones in soil most at home The mole builds his swimming pool. Nearby, the guns of the alliance heat up, Snag and burn on the…

This is a picture of the unrequited. It wants you to touch it. Its torso exists as a diagonal plane of yellow crumbling into black: a horizon where it turns, cell by cell, into dust. Cropped at the neck, it yet retains a dumb capacity to love. For which it reprimands itself repeatedly. Yesterday it…

The first café on Valencia Street offers chai and a new book the author of it, his theory of aesthetics is blue and green. The green tastes like another kingdom. The water is in the green. The fruit is in the green. The history of devastation is in the fruit and the water and the…

You sang to me throughout the winter the same desultory song. Each flake of snow, each pellet of ice fell like music to the frozen ground. I lived on crackers in a cardboard house. Got down on my knees and sang to the dirt, “Go ahead, my dear. Eat all his fruit this year. Each…

I would’ve called him Ice Cream, or Monopoly, or Grand Slam: something I especially liked. He’d have played catch with me when no one else was home. He might have come from planet Fev, where God taught him kung fu. He might have traded crescent kicks with Christ. Or been a girl. Maybe on Fev,…