Poetry

When I’m sick, I wish     whatever song is in my head would stop. Tonight, it’s the same     tune my mother sang to tuck me in, its notes      the kind of kindness only distant trains still hit—soft     like a string of Christmas lights sort-of      smiling from a darkened window—the same tune     I took up, humming some, to steel myself against…

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones   Having someone who knows that you fall asleep best on your stomach. And being unable to fall asleep because of him.   Wondering: how much do you share, and how much keeps you apart? And in what way– as a tongue the edges of an envelope   it would like…

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones You wrote to me about a tame pet hedgehog who fell in love with a scrubbing brush.   Shut inside four walls he’d found that special someone like him and not like him, otherness and kinship.   How hard he pattered around it before he understood that otherness has an advantage…

I’d hear a sound off in the trees and follow it for hours. I touched the bark of an old maple and watched the ants take my hand.   Still in the front yard my mamma is cleaning trout, like her life there is the gutting, the clipping of fins.   I sliced my leg…

I hope you’re glad I’d rather send you A letter by regular mail than a message Beamed in an instant from screen to screen. To fold the pages twice and insert them Into an envelope seems to make them More of a gift, to wrap them, to suggest I’ve chosen my words for you alone,…

If I said, Your smile glows with empiricism. If I said, You are hydrogen, heliumed by the sun.   If I said, You are both key and prison, claw and feather, absent hum.   If I said, Your breath is opiate paradox. If I said, Your voice is thin as time.   If I said,…

What we remember most is our surprise.   The gardener’s blood-thirst after family was lost to the fight.   Asters went unwatered except by rain.   It may not have been prayer caught in our throat but privilege, or cartilage, or birds.   There are things we did not imagine:   rooftops bloused in ruin;…

We look at each other until the power goes out. Until our eyes become sad hills in an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller. The sound around us is closer to the waving of a wet flag than a fist meeting an enemy’s jaw. In the distance, the lake erases the last of the windsurfers, leaving behind only…

Faces loom and eclipse under heaven’s attentive glare. Hieroglyph eyebrows. Burnished cheek. Dark scribble of beard. He wants to know: How far can you see into me by the roar of this morning’s light? The surface of his lips like the thirsty surface of sandstone or granite. Am I becoming statuary? he asks. Then let…