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By 1970, 33 states had banned shoe-store x-ray machines. Mr. Levitz sits on a stool measuring feet with a steel slide that feels cool when it nudges the tip of my toe. Future and past mean less than the ash on his cigarette, which will fall on the floor, because the plate in his…
In dreams, she sees her mother arrive in a land where the boreal canopy eclipses homeland. Her first memory of an elk in Jasper, Alberta: its legs seizing with strength, it gallops toward homeland. As she reads the Quran, she becomes a rose-ringed parakeet ascending over bismillah to find homeland. She is…
From you, I was born, my body an isosceles triangle made with two equal sides of longing: what is given and what is prayed for, these pining lengths yoked together by the latitude of a risen country I have never visited. I imagine the view from the ocean is your body, and your body is…
Every prayer is a heron at first glance, the marbled neck of someone indistinguishable from this house. Every figure wildreed unbelonged cursive is a morning’s mound of sugar. This mosque is a wood where I sit cross-legged, alder straight. Where I mirror my mother’s twenty-year-ago askings. …
Perhaps with a desk between, some chaste space, the recruiter leaning forward, warm bodies on the other side. Of the teenagers present one will lie about her age, one will eat bananas to make weight, one pull herself from small-town quicksand. Lace the hands behind the head, look good in a uniform, look…
Where this body is a map and blood, great-blood, great-great-blood is the destination, where the tragedy is not knowing a name until it is a burial, and even then, only after it is hallowed from its journey, crossing a sea, wrung on the muscles of grief. At your grave, it must be…
The sky so white there is no sky. The water, a tarnished plate of silver. The dog sits dutifully. No, sits like a king who says nothing, who looks around unmoved, his golden robe shedding.
I think of the man in the V for Vendetta mask dangling his legs off the roof of a drugstore on Franklin Street. No one else seemed to see. My friends kept walking toward the restaurant, talking about tax breaks and single payers, and I told myself, advertising stunt, Halloween prankster, my imagination, and then…
Because the blinds stay open, I see birds. I watch men watch those birds. Men monitoring flight paths and a soaring hunger for the crumbs they shouldn’t’ve pocketed from chow. The indifferent birds ask for nothing, yearn for nothing, except perhaps the sky, which is nothing to them but magnetic blue wind—their one great…
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