Poetry

What bird was that that just flew through my mind?

Open carry, open for business, open and shut case. Open like a store. Open like a vault. Any opening in my defenses is your fault so I close it all up as tight as I can. Then I fold closed both my hands again. This gesture makes a fist. It makes me listless and makes…

Transcendence The first thing is silence: the muffling power of snow, that Fairbanks snow hanging on every limb and twig. No noise from nearby roads, no sounds of planes taking off at the airport. Just my skis gliding along, my poles crunching the snow. My breath, and if I stopped to listen, the sound of…

On the special ed school tour, he asks what is that tiny room with the tiny window, and the assistant admissions director tells us it is the seclusion room. We look at the closet-size featureless space with the metal- reinforced door and large thick steel bar on the outside, and our faces are not as…

How to describe the color of a pond gone fugue in autumn wind surface tinctured blue, sky-stained and deeper water tea-stained from steeping in peat that netted entanglement that took a thousand years to form. How far the land can go in telling a story, water dark as obsidian night toward which I progress every…

Translated from the Braj Bhasha by Chloe Martinez                     Listen, his gorgeous face is all I can see. I’m living and breathing him; he stays rent-free in my mind—           what I’m saying is, I keep seeing my beloved. Wherever his feet have touched the ground, I start dancing.                               I’m telling you: his face. Mine. Transfixed. Mira’s…

Dear Dactinomycin, I have a question: How do you save a body from the body itself? Your job: stop cells dividing, freeze growth. The proof: hair coming out in clumps, disappeared eyelashes, platelets drained so low they called for a transfusion. A mother’s job: grow a small body, then grow it up. Even volunteer to…

— after C. D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade “Beech is Anglo-Saxon boc: book, document, or charter,” she (C. D.) writes. “The shoots grow faster in the dark,” she writes in her 250-some page diary of obsession. Here, now, at the smallpox cemetery near where I live, the shin-high marble grave markers, corners softened, stand canted, like awkward lumber….

In an old story, the Almighty shaped clay with His hands to fashion the first man. In this story, enslaved hands shaped clay to make bricks to build storied big houses that will stand in this land. Both stories lead on to sagas of births—natal tales filled with first wails and nations of folk and…