Poetry

Man is the cruelest animal. She wanted to sleep with the philosopher, she wanted to feel the warmth of his back against her chest. Some people had trouble with the consonants, others reversed the vowels. He made her think—that was his gift. She wanted to name a restaurant after him, the offerings cued to his…

across the Passaic’s asphalt drawbridge into the heart of Kearny— my cheeks flushed with wine—you the muse I did not choose dragging danger down in chains across the hangdog face of me as I followed you upriver, wanting you to cleanse me like a sari fitted through a virgin’s wedding band—why else would I cruise…

Whether the language rebellion against phallogocentrism is really the deepest thing or whether it’s just a way of getting out of history i.e., race, class, and gender, so tiresome, so unavoidable; whether, that is, poetry, etc., no matter how weird, surreal, anti-referential, disruptive, etc., accepts things as they are when they need to be changed?…

Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998 Here in a bar on the street of the saint en la calle San Sebastián, a dancer in white with a red red scarf en la calle San Sebastián, calls to the gods who were freed by slaves en la calle San Sebastián, and his bronze face is a…

Whenever she met someone, she secretly analyzed their handwriting. She wondered if these insights were illicitly gained, like wiretapping, but reasoned that graphology was merely close attention to the person without the distraction of interaction. Each element of the psyche had its equivalent mark on paper: the dominant upper zone of one friend indicated spirituality,…

There is nothing more than a painted room and I, a painted woman in it by an open window, a brass sun and a blob of flowers on a cabinet. Crowds come in every day to look at the bold brass color of the sun, the window quite unlike any other; the cabinet with flowers….

All summer and fall the couple floats hand in hand from work at the shelter workshop. Hand in hand in their secondhand sleeveless oxford shirts. With target tattoos on their deltoids. Even in the winter, the same way, hand in hand, although bundled up in secondhand wool coats. One snowy evening, right after they pass…

Is it a vanishing point or is it      Brooklyn into which the cables run      Brooklyn over which these two      these shadowy walkers come      against the shaded rails against      the future in the arcades in the bridge      the parallels above them in midair                                     § Under a clatter of fire…