Poetry

Plow your tweener backpack  into your fellow sinner.   I was fallen too.    Sulk into your years  and cropped organdy nails.  Everybody’s watching.    Your body’s burnt to ash,   to the stranger’s thumbprint  on your stubborn pimples.    I see a younger you,   a candle-smoke ghost  hardening into form,    fleshy knees and fists  marbled at the altar rail.  You’re still the baby    who asked no deliverance.  We’re not…

is about sorrow the same way the 56-ounce bag of red white and blue M&Ms is about sorrow. The former has a chorus in which Jurado croons is in your arms while the latter features text—resealable zipper!— at bag’s top because if you’ve got something too stupid to say aloud you should shout it. 71˚,…

The last time I saw my father sound and marrow-filled,   he was standing on the front porch— almost the weight   of a ghost. As I waved goodbye I felt a nerve twitch—   like a dog’s ear batting a fly. He never sold me the world.   He never said that people are…

I don’t often revisit the year I fostered all the neighborhood strays, teenagers   enticed by decay and overrun with the lesions that wistfulness deals.   I don’t often revisit the year my parents disappeared, but whose house we filled   with smoke so indissoluble it consoled like blindness—   the year pedestrians crossed the…

reading on the couch, your messy hair finally beginning to gray. You are breathing, moving molecules of air aside, inhabiting space that could go empty so easily. You hold a heating pad to your side where I bruised your rib, clumsy in my hunger for your infinite variety. ya’aburnee, lovers say in Arabic— you bury…

You know how lightning never lasts long enough to get a good look at it?   and your eyes do this thing, as if they could grow larger, widen out of your face trying to see enough, longer, more—   this happens also when the heron passes: too quickly. Today I lucked into seeing how…

What I got of worldly gumption I learned in the church of false assumption. Under the sentence of wrath and fire I studied the windows, the girls in the choir.

A small room, a small porch, a large window, a stove, a table, a chair, a cot, a few books, a few thoughts, a notebook, a pencil, an eraser…

Gary Snyder is a man of the West and of the Far East, which is farther west. Or say you go to the east, and then you’ll come first to the East, but then to the West, which is Europe the seat of Western Civilization. American historians know that Kentucky once was the West and…