Poetry

—For Feiga Maler, 1919-1942, who died in the Kraków Ghetto     Night after night, what she saw in her sleep: an upside down Havdalah candle like the one she lit to usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath,   praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark…”   The candle…

There’s no heroism to it. Like getting dressed in the morning, it’s just practice: force my head past the collar, squiggle to pull up the zipper behind my back, slither into tights and distinguish blue pumps from black. I pour the cereal in my bowl the same way each morning because that’s how it’s done—…

ashes ~ strong sunlight interacting with green, the leaf an engine trembling in the wind ~ fur and flies ~ the stars behind the clouds ~ gas as a mass ~ the sweat on my back, carrying down my spine the traces of sweat four centuries old that ran into wounds ~ recycled survival ~ the blue-black of the pacific floor and the tentacles pulling life across it ~ the pulsing…

At Christmastime we stay only one night, and it’s a dump—burn holes in brown carpet, no air. We keep the window open to the swamp, listen to raccoons and musk rats pitch in the marsh as they give last fight to the gators devouring. The next three days we drive in separate cars three hours…

I.   Is the Constitution the thread that holds the country free together, or not? For years, both said no; now one picks up the thread and—apostate—changes his mind. Is it a proslavery, an antislavery document, or is it a thread that cannot hold two men together, nor set them free?   II.   Whose…

The Sentencing of John Punch to Perpetual Slavery, Virginia, 1640   To take a fistful of tobacco— after mixing the gnat-size seeds   with sand, after scattering, after thinning the seedlings,   after hoeing the knee-high hills, after picking cutworm larvae   or tobacco flea beetles from the dusty leaves,   after priming and topping,…

translated by Jhumpa Lahiri I found a notebook filled with poems, written in Italian, in my desk in Rome. I am trying to understand who wrote them. It may be a woman named “Nerina,” which is the only thing written on the cover of the notebook.   I’d like to know for certain who ate…

When I press my fingertips together and make a tangerine-size space that the light comes through   I see God there a little bit—a glowy something   I try to press deeper in past the flesh and bone   my breath pulls into it to hold it there deeper stiller and I worry about dying…

No one’s gonna say it, but your baby’s ugly. It’s not your fault. All babies look like aliens. This is another thing I said a little drunk that I meant with my whole heart and every time my mouth opens the thing I mean comes out, but it comes out wrong. The ice caps are…