Poetry

I imagine he sank like copper, a bright flutter, but I wasn’t there when they pulled him out. I only know the splintered dock where they laid his featherweight, and the way Keith’s hands shook hours later, still cool from cradling him beneath the dark bulk of the Palisades. Now, autumn falls around us in…

Grant to my brother that he come here unharmed. Grant safe passage, that he arrive whole and with his eyes open. Grant him refreshment of breath, yellow sand beneath his feet, and in his hands a few coins, a few white crystals of salt. Please grant to my brother,         lost now among winds,        …

In 1972, the Bangladeshi state adopted a policy to accord a new visibility to the 200,000 women raped during the War of Independence by eulogizing them as birangonas (war heroines), though they were frequently ostracized by their families and social circles. —Nayanika Mookherjee Do you remember what you were doing when they came for you?…

on the wall by the fireplace we can fill it      with stones, flowers, toenails, pebbles of shit     or scat      or something else Anglo-Saxon   and indispensable. No books on Texas      birds, no botany, the rock is called a batholith, stands 1,825 feet, a large, solid granite dome          where white men fled captivity,…

Chaos ignites temperaments. Charge out each day and plunder.   Bones be buried. Bones be broken. Renounce blood, a larger black.   Each morning renews chaste vows, only to be unbridled by afternoon.   The way an ox would plow a field drunk youngsters prove their anger.   A cadence of steel coffins hidden by…

Furious snow cardinals & diode array. Methuselah walks by me in coats. Vast brackets of light. Those sugar packets on the road:                                               a branch encased in ice would almost seem to indicate them. The first bomb opens itself in space. By red by half-silvered light—“to home.” How that a life were but a place?…

Bones like a bird’s you quicken your hands, flit and mock,   take stock of who’s watching— every move a melodrama, a poised   snap, a shot that shapes you as the lead of a film no one   can stop. Your fingers play invisible keyboards,   your toes point, turn out in stance, your…

We would like to grow herbs, cooking herbs and chamomile and lavender, and keep birds, farm fish, collect dogs and cats and horses. There isn’t enough room in the apartment. We need a plant to cover the litter boxes in the bathroom. There’s an unfinished birdcage you’ve built in the bedroom and now you’ve started…

for Grace There’s an oak leaf, one     caught in the latch on the door lodged like a letter in a letter box. It knocks slowly, eight-prongs     the wind tips it back, head leaning away     stem like a tail, wind knocking softly      turning over the life of a tough brown leaf. Stronger than a grasping hand,…