Poetry

My mother has never died yet. My father has died oh so many years ago. I have never died yet though I have not died from trying. What is the most profound tragedy that can befall a family? And the dream answered: The death of the primary wage-earner. My sister has never died yet though…

a delicate box. The child inside it. It’s okay to not think about how the child came to be in the box. It’s okay to focus solely on what the child offers: the sound of fireweed bending in wind, yesterday’s pages torn from their binding, a small hand. Yesterday there was no sign of the…

“What’s for you won’t go by you,” he told me, the great, recalcitrant songwriter so heavy-browed with doubt and kindness. I was eighteen and had taken a Greyhound from New York to Nashville to find him, my corduroys indistinguishable from my self. That whole wolf-on-skates year his music had saved me, made me feel something…

I found a boat tied up at the water’s edge, rocking, rope frayed, oars banging in their locks. At home, you never knew what might happen. A surprise a minute, they say. In the distance dark clouds, no trace of the other shore. It might have been wise to have brought a compass and life…

We’d only just begun to scratch the floors  with our own furniture, unfold the box flaps  and hang the walls to look like our walls  in the old apartment: familiar faces, fruits.  Then we heard it, the long scrapes in deep   grooves overhead. It came from the devil’s  peak, after we’d turned the bedroom into the…

I search online for causes and find that most are tied to loss. A child, a parent, a friend, regret. For me, the I is lost. The most awful things happen hours after a session, not another for a week or two. The Therapy Curse, I call it, covering the years I’ve lost. Sometimes I…

He’s wearing two watches, one set to the local time in New York, the other in Gaza. In a café with friends, waiting for his tea at the round table, and whenever his eyes fall on the dial of the Gaza watch, he can see the kids of his Gaza neighborhood running in the alleys,…

Neighbors smuggle the sun through tunnels beneath the houses. The smoke of bombs dropped from the F-16s has covered the city’s sky.

At my first history class, the only students attending are the future, the present, and the past. As I step in, the future gets ready to leave, while the past straddles the present, handcuffing it, severing its hamstrings, and dyeing its clothes gray.