Two boys sit on a log washed white by the tides and wind. A driftwood fire hisses on the sand. Down the beach, the black waves roar. It’s August 1995, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. One boy, one teenager, is pale. The other is dark. Between them, they pass the bottle of Scotch…
THE CLUMSIEST I When I pulled the book down, only vaguely curious, it fell open to fighting bulls. People seemed glad when the bull was driven in. It has a pretty red breast, but because it comes in winter to the window to be fed? Nothing here looked like it might have already been…
I cried in public again. Drive, I said to my beloved, drive. I can’t have people watch me cry. It’s bad enough watching people watch me touch fruit at the grocery store. Prickly pear glaring across the sweet heaps. It’s not my fault the citrus is too soft. It’s not my fault you blame me….
Translated by Iain Galbraith |one’s still clattering in the box, in safekeeping like a child’s first tooth i and then it is struck in the thickest darkness: ah! here i am. or was.
Five: Pedigree of watermelons No one mistakes a watermelon for a meteorite. The theory of watermelons vs. stars is completely irrelevant. But we cannot deny that the earth is a kind of star. Therefore, it’s implausible to deny that watermelons have the lineage of stars. Four: Watermelon, ancestral hometown We live outside the…
Big Spring, Arrow Rock, MO The body records its absences. Water, you take water into it—as presence, as absence, deep into the archive of water you throw your mask. Also, your other mask. We, being matter, are negotiated. I had not thought to be angry, as such. But rage flexes its majestic undoing, its…
And when I awoke, I saw that I was gone. Just like that, the woman I thought I knew, gone into the morning like the mockingbird’s song. After all these years, it was a bit of a surprise, even though I had seen it coming, the way you see a train approaching from afar, crawling…
After Hadrian Go, little sister, Flesh-flap peeled From blistered heel, Yellow pellicle Skimmed with a fork Off scalded milk. Where will you go, How far on wind-whistle To marrow within a creature Not yet born When I become no longer Your bodied brother? Vanishing twin, forever young, No reason to…
Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez each morning I wonder at my face: the same as always! Shouldn’t we reach the dawn with face changed? After a new word our lips should have a different feel! Only the beloved manages such a miracle face sheds features before the vision…
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