Poetry

As if I carried a palace of glass And crept up slowly with it in my hand   To slip over your sleeping Body your innocence adhering   To the wall as you tripped inside Not unlike the way you once arrived   Within my icebox among maroon leaves Of radicchio and voluptuous beets  …

Gravity is the weakest force But it can bring a body down   An adjunct professor on concrete outside of a church A hood entrepreneur on concrete outside a three-story walk up A schizophrenic son on concrete outside of his mother’s apartment A recent high school grad on a bathroom floor A biking single mother…

The horses starved then came back as snow,   dementia, fire, rings in the trees   swaddling frost. For a year,   sparse meals & our child in mud.   This morning I worried about money,   the life we’ve made & the future.   How long it would take to dig out the car….

From Of Breaking Glass   To think of you at your lowest point   in the lowest point of the Western   Hemisphere. Badwater: metabolize this.   Walk through salt. Wallblood. Sandhour.   Brother: nobody can harm you anymore.   Miocenic insignia. Glass inside clavicles   of rock. Quartz breath of oxygen. Agora-   phobia,…

I spent the last year avoiding people who announce the forms they write in. My life calmed. Became less try-hard.   Son, I want that for you— A careful economy of sound decisions

Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence….

Translated by Carolyn Forché   This is the sign for “human” and this is the sign for “god.” This is the thought that life actually lies outside the one who lives it—yes, that life would continue even if we did not do so, as if it were a large tenement where some move in and…

Translated by Carolyn Forché The curtain moved gently, dawn spilled milk over the city. I never saw you again like that.

On the second day, light; on the third, water, then the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, etcetera, until you come to the lesson-centered day you see the Milky Way as the downy drink   of morning. You’re ever aware of the shared terror of the shy kids souring the air in the classroom. The globe spins…