Poetry

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

I’d hear a sound off in the treesand follow it for hours.I touched the bark of an old maple and watchedthe ants take my hand. Still in the front yardmy mamma is cleaning trout,like her life there is the gutting,the clipping of fins. I sliced my leg open on the fence leadingto this wildness, two…

I hope you’re glad I’d rather send youA letter by regular mail than a messageBeamed in an instant from screen to screen.To fold the pages twice and insert themInto an envelope seems to make themMore of a gift, to wrap them, to suggestI’ve chosen my words for you alone,The very person whose name I’ve written…

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, Your hands sweep through clotsof memory,…

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

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 scribbleof beard. He wants to know: How far can you see into meby the roar of this morning’s light? The surface of his lipslike the thirsty surface of sandstone or granite. Am Ibecoming statuary? he asks. Then let me be monument.Long ago, men…

My dresses huddle in their closet.No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted,unhaunted, since you disappeared.Torture by laundry and mothballis all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas.And despite the holiday, there’s endlesswrestling on tv. Is that your nudge to me:toughen up and roll with the punches?Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.Sea monsters burst from…

He held my hand on the ride from El Centropast the sugar beet plant     its smell of dying frogs like the ones we’d dissected in biology lab     the formaldehyde on my fingers for days     the way lettuce smelled like slicing     or tomatoes     little hearts     They formed a white mountain     the sugar hulls     sweet climbing hillgated     & locked beside alfalfa fields      The desert sky roiled…