Poetry

(for Jeanne) 1 There were only certain stones                                                   we could step on to cross the river.   2 The stones we could step on to cross the river    …

For my daughter: these images, these trenches of script. She keeps reaching to pull them from the page, as if the book were an opened cabinet; every time, the page blocks her hand. They’re right there—those pictures vivid as stained glass, those tiny, inscrutable knots. They hang in that space where a world was built…

A gray row of corrugated huts hunkering down in rain. Across the way the fire burns night and day though unseen in sun light. Bernard wakens to the aroma of warming milk and burned coffee. Later we’ll say he had the bearing of an angel with clear eyes, a wide brow, thick golden curls. His…

ALBA 1 8 a.m. and we punch out and leave the place to our betters. 2,000 miles and fifty years later and at my back I always hear Chevy Gear & Axle grinding the day shift workers into antiquity. ALBA 2          The river works. No one flips a switch, no one…

Sad jar of atoms, I say when Jacqui cuts her thumb instead of a cucumber or returns from her run wet as a dog. Sad jar yourself, she says after a cop clocks me doing 45 in a school zone. This is called borrowing a Byronic phrase describing life and attaching it to your beloved….

She is crushing on a younger guy after many conversations about things like the brain’s musical notations or quinoa recipes. His round face, wire rims almost ubiquitous, every young man at work kind of looks like that. She tells her husband about the crush, he thinks it’s probably good for her. When she talks to…

Because my grandmother is dead but because when she lived she favored this place, I too have crossed the rutted road and come to Mohanraj Jewellers. At seven on a Sunday evening I could wire cash or purchase rubies. I could change my dollars for a packet of bills the size of a grown man’s…

Everything’s a window the professor told my class, and I thought about breaking that glass, or shutting the curtains, or better yet opening those windows and climbing out into the snowy world beyond. He said fashioning windows is the only way we can make sense of what we see, so even as I walked off…

My mother started writing essays in English, essays with wrong punctuation, wrong tenses, wrong spacing wrong spelling, with Arabic terms too, typed in English (and a French accent) when she cannot find the translation for…mina. In her e-mail she tells me she’s very “exited” about this— her American teacher loves her ideas, even in her…