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…
Ask her if she is cold. Ask her if she needs to hide. Fold her into a rectangle and slip her into your breast pocket. She will record the auditory data regarding the condition of the heart. Motherdreaming. Mother turning into sleep. Mother changing the channel. Mother turning underwater. M mostly becomes sunflower head bending…
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