Poetry

glass begets glass—the anniad i pray about myself to myself and because of that i listen—i imagineanother body where there is none—i can touch, from here,an icicle, though i’d never—there are small infinities and largeinfinities, and what is unreachable is sometimes perfectlywithin reach—that is the thing about the evening: while as a childi might touch…

Translation by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang I woke this morning to find my house surroundedby two things:the turtledove and the willow. When I write,there is the sculpted turtledove, the spoken willow.When I drink tea,the replete turtledove, the hollowed-out willow.When I cannot get to sleep,the scattershot turtledove and the focus of the willow.When I…

After it all, a bridesmaid hands you the vodka                    you’ve waited for, so clear and chill it tastes bell-like against your tongue, as though it could hollow you from your heart outward,                    hollow you as February hollows the fields beyond the church, the sliced cornstalks thinly rustling. You’re impatient for crocuses,                    for their scent of fresh petrichor, their…

It’s getting toward my timeto be enrolled among the legionsof the fallen pretty-good poets.A grateful earth has patted their heads. And here’s my head,this failing crop of white hairsmown to stubble;these dry discolored lumpshalf-hidden in it, recalling all those makeshift graves in the bullet-mownCornfield at Antietam.—And then came hundreds of mourning doves,to peck at the…

City-born, we’d never livedin view of a horizon,  or beneath the expansiveblue above sheep, but rent in Iowa was cheap,including more green beans than we could eat,wildflowers grew from water  in empty jars. In fall,the hardwoods burn without  a fire and make no excusefor what’s in store. And everything withinwas ours, no one else behindthe…

After they split, my father used scissors to cut my mother from our childhood photos; blacked out her name in the lower-left corners of large paintings of wild horses, of men huddled together in a desert wedding against a burnt sienna sky, of little scarlet gondolas in Venice, the canal always the same cerulean. I…

Beginning, I said, or becoming. He began dissecting my choice. No -ing words, no developing or growing—who are you now, not who are you beginning to be? I began stammering. I didn’t like not being believed, I knew that, even if I didn’t know anything else about myself. I’d begun the day not knowing him….

First date, bowling alley. Poor choice, no chance to talk, one of us always taking a turn. When he bowled, his hip curved, same stance as when he played trumpet, school band where we met. After two games, still silent, we held hands in our center lane, the eye, movement all around us, bowlers, spinning…

After Camille Dungy’s “characteristics of life”                                    TodayI misheard the word eternity as the trinity. I was looking at those birds, falling from the sky,thousands of them, a photo of their corpses inthe Times, lined up on a white sheet of paper, like words. Warbler.Flycatcher. Swallow. Eternity. Trinity.Die-off. An airplane passes overhead, then another. The cradle…