The love rose in my heart has wilted The love bug The news on the transistor A nice man with a ponytail says It’s understandable If you wanted to leave here for there They were burying the evidence Structurally Boys in prison cells And outside the kids play stretcher One of them was dying Between…
jolie might not be one of your color colony dates but I know just what you, calm to coordination, might say. these luminous treasures before me might not be at brink of what’s poisonous but pollen down the river like women we lost passes like a morning cooking a mother long-lived and radiant where…
The faces changing in the rooms’ changing light were just the beginning of stories, unwritten, untold, hardly imagined, whose flickering hid promises of the expected, of loves, of works to come, deeper in the plot, and the edge of thinking pressed against the heart like an argument, its rupture, loss of blood, the near-death scene,…
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…
Spring 2009 - Digital