Poetry

Once, a woman’s musk on the train conjured the pinch of my seaside youth —briny, consistent in its waterlogged blessing. I waited out my contract of subtropical longing, now here, manifested in these splayed, commuters’ bodies peppered with wage and heat, lapping each other daily.   I bend down and boost you up, future self,…

          Like when she takes out a 1000-piece Abstract—a Kandinsky or mandala of Buddha’s numberless lives— she’s telling me she hasn’t lost hope yet but it’s iffy for us.             When Lois slides from the shelf one from The World’s Great Destinations series, for example, “Balloons on a Spring Night over Paris,”—actually, any place we’ve been…

It may have been one of the times we died, only to come right back. Maybe we rolled the car and were reborn in the woods without a clue. At least I hope death is like this: a town with just two restaurants. What a steady fire I make against the night. What a good…

The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed…and into your ovens and kneading troughs. —EXODUS 8:3   When, as punishment, my father made me read the Book of Exodus, he never offered explanation. The lesson, perhaps, was: Fathers should speak to their sons…

on the front steps of some young professional’s apartment in Boston.                     She smokes I hold my breath it is hard for both of us to breathe. Her: heavy doses of meds Me: small doses of meds meant to make seeing her less painful, other things less crushing.                     Today it is hot she tries to blow…

The window is a world, the trees continents, complicated, crowding the blue and hazy shore and that house, that house over there, my mistakes come to rest in the landscape. How did they find me, invisible, behind glass? How did they become so solid, so fixed and neighborly, more vigilant each day, looking out for…

I buried my girlhood in the garden where nothing grows, at the bottom of the river that runs through it. I buried   the hair ribbons and skirts with shorts sewn underneath, buried the blow-up pool and flamingo floaties, the plush lamb   tied to a string. My girlhood, sunburned with skinned knees, leaving wet…

I will always remember Pythagoras because of you. An artist not a scholar, carpenter,  or for that matter a teacher at all— even in grade eight we understood you taught a2 + b2 = c2  for three straight months  because it was the only math you knew  and our regular teacher with his  re-heated coffees…

For a decade, I smoked a pack a day. It wasn’t the drug I craved but pure, gleaming abandon. At sixteen, I bent a car around a tree and loved the moment when I slipped headfirst from the webbed glass into a pool of streetlight, a puddle of my own blood. Sliding from the wreck…