Poetry

To the Memory of Lee “Scratch” Perry 20 March 1936 – 29 August 2021   Source of echo madman of prophecies buffering nonsense in absence of anything solid as cloud flung from the womb pale pallid asteroid belt of nanny goat   conjuror of the ill-spoken ad-libbing in shadow a race in a curve as…

Translated by Boris Dralyuk             Why sit like a guest but not wipe your feet? Every town’s built on bones, not just St. Pete.   One should build homes on stone, not on a bog. True enough, but for now the work is a slog.   My life’s on the scales— the losses won’t cease….

My life, you were a door I was given to walk through.   Dawdling in lintel and loosestrife as much as permitted.   Your own glass knob, I spoke you:   a sentence, however often rewritten, ending always with the same slightly rusty-hinged preposition. Sometimes, for mercy, hidden.

Was it my parents’ sour grapes that have set my teeth on edge? Or is this bitterness in my mouth from seeds   I’ve sown myself? The woman I left weeping in an East Village restaurant. Or maybe the one I had to wrestle back   from a seaside cliff, an empty fifth of Maker’s…

Translated by Grace Mahoney   in a country where everyone’s name is fear: it’s good that you don’t see a thing and don’t hear a thing. Say to anyone not a thing. Slip nothing in your bra. Keep nothing in your pocket. In both ears, nothing. In two eyes, nothing.  Blind feet. No looking back….

It pushes its way through, a luminous thing. Cactus, radiant with small blunt thorns, sharply glistening column. But also, in a room without walls, a load-bearing wall, a mast without sail on a hovering boat. Straight as a nail,  shadowless.   It’s my mother’s picture, she took it in the woods. The column was found…

Translated from the Spanish by Jenny Minniti-Shippey   The child searches for his voice. (The king of the crickets had it.) In a drop of water, the child searched for his voice.   I don’t want it in order to speak; I’ll make with it a ring that will carry my silence on his tiny…

Arms out, our crowd of hands a cage, we take them, hairy and clean. Their fur-rags shake. We look down on their backs and heads. Their faces point up. They can’t see what they look like. Made of heat and sun-stripe, yip and squawk, matted in patterns and wrong-way curls— we’ve been told they have…

From a series documenting several years (1980–2021) of multi-day cycling tours.   Slaterville Springs, NY – Ithaca – Syracuse – Seaway Trail – Ogdensburg – Saint-Zotique, QC – Montreal. Home on Amtrak. October 1980; 334 miles. Via Gitane.   Pushed up from the south on the Seaway Trail—New York State Route 3—along Lake Ontario, crossing…