Poetry judge Natalie Diaz said, “These poems have a lexicon and language all their own. They build each body—body of person, body of land or sea—with a precision and a sensuality that comes from understanding there are more than five senses. A reader is given the gift of feeling the silences, the touches, the strengths…
Some bells ring of their own accord.Some need the boy who pulls the ropeand is lifted off his feet on the upswing.The pigeons scatter from the tower’sshaken air. Their paratrooper feathersstorm the shaft of light.By what miracle does he recall, years later,such ascension, the last timehe loved a church, was lifted,literally, by song? These wild…
Tanks run over the castleof my childhood in December.On our black-and-white TVI see the riot policeshields and truncheons.Vinegar is the only thingyou can buy in the stores.Telephones turn into toys.Because of a curfew,my father’s bedtime storiesgrow longer than ivy andwilder than calendula. Restless in bed, on the ceilingI conjure green magical birdsthat take us to…
When the pilot calls it rough air, I think of a cat’s tongue,as if the air itself were textured, as if we could feel its sandpaperlicking our skin. I swallow my ears open, and the silencewhich is not silence at all fills them. In the absence of faith I resort to magical thinking. I pray…
Something’s falling in increments of banging and slight popping, klunks,and then littlechittering rolls,the roof I mean is being hit by objectsnuts, fruitsof the season: this miserable natural worldhurls these things…and then there’re the wolf howlsor coyotesas they callthem here and the barks and snuffles of so-called bearsand yesterday I saw a small tub-bottomed bishopcrossing the…
sometimes I’m issued a new headand the old one dropsoff and then I see the new one isn’t newit’s a usedhead, sometimes a bit moldyor flushedwith rage, this headfilled with notes on what is wrong with the worldor carrying a listof expendables or groceriesa head that remembers sunset castinga golden shineinto the wheator the painting…
A tense obligato, the light comes up out of a shallow grave.It was only resting. Sulphur butterflies, taking a holidayin the garden, one in shades of yellow and orange, the otherthe same plus chestnut spots, drift abovewhite-faced mallows, giving a sense of softness, richnessto the situation, paralleling the stinks and murderpoking up everywhere, each an…
a crisis averted in gulfport pops up again in forest hillsor someone’s talking about a job bucking timber or after a coldlobster supper on the cape its fabricator forgets the singular phrasethat explains everything and then you’re revokingyesterday’s permit or tailing a cheat across lower manhattanor you’ve just changed the name of your dreamboat and…
I took absence down to the ocean and becauseit is blind, I told it about the waves.I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my armsaround the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges.I walked beside absence in the streets at nightand I let it tell me stories. Child who is…
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