Poetry

—from Definitions Freudenschreck, or “intense pleasure-fright”—leave it to the GermansTo coin a word for the fleeting sense of being seizedBy such an inexplicable joy it verges on terror.Or maybe it’s inexplicable terror pretending to be joy.Also, a physical phenomenon: neurologists say the amygdalaGlows red as a jack ball whether subjects gaze at images of planetesimals…

1.Woke up early to write, killed flies instead. 2.In the pot, I boil bones with huājiāo and fennel, attempting toreproduce a past taste. The result is a gray diluted broth, ghost enoughto conjure. 3.On Facebook you can tag a picture as “my grandmother.” If you hover your mouse over the blue tag of “my grandmother,”…

You will want to go back. Notright away, perhaps, not as you runtowards the train’s open doors and not during the nightmilesin which the distance collapsesunder the wheels into ordinary darkness. And maybe not while laid acrossthe row of empty airplane seats,the young Chinese couple helping you order food the first to witnessyour foreignness and…

—after Wrecked Archive B-45HqDHfqp by Patty Paine I am inching along the Mackinac Bridge, passenger in a van.Through the frosted window, the sun is a yellow explosion,blown open, its blood a sulfur-yellow sheen that pools in thedistance on top of Lake Huron. The clack-clack-clack of thetires over the bridge’s steel grates sounds like one of my…

—after Wrecked Archive B-VAYKjKGqG image by Patty Paine Initially, I think the clown is in charge, because he is tweetingnothing but commands—no salutations, no jokes or puns orother clown-speak—but I am wrong. “I know who all of youpunks are!” he yells, shaking his fist, clutching a list that hethinks identifies the children, but he is wrong….

The world returns a bit on the fifthAlone Together day.                                            Amina’s teacher sends assignmentsover email.                    A friend calls with good news:Eileen got the Good Letter, the happy onefrom the school she wanted.                                        We return to the endless taskof freeing the front yard from weeds, and neighborscome by and stand at a distance, saying dubiously,“It looks all right,” or…

                                                  how much of the hand is fist my father asks—                                                        for him it’s halfwhat you’d expect—the tape’s temper                  between splint and split knuckles:symbol’s useless rigor;                                             the long ride home—                                                  for the boy with the torn lip,it’s half what you’d expect                                       bleaching blood off someripped…

maybe it’s too early for glow, slow asa cloud slung like what a soldier might carryhome—I’ll never understand whymy mother, for example, carrieda set of latrine tools, mosquito netting,a cat that wouldn’t leave her sideher infidelities, she carried thosetoo, like volcanic stonesthat which impossibly formed insidethe open mouth of mountains of whatone might choose to…

The orchard rippling in torrential windand apples themselves bob or drop, a swiftlapsarian plunge. Meal and moldering—in every core, trace cyanide and seed. Again, again, against the wind, my hatlike such small boat with sail taught, tugging.A lowtide mind, a rough dumb slosh-round bone.The satisfaction to be gained in weightof wanting, measured out by peck…