Poetry

The Latvians Stir Ghosts

When I saw her in her urban kitchen— thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress— a glass wall was between us polished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust. All winter she’d lived up the hill in the gray house with the damp walls, the rains fading the fields. The snow— its ice-floe memories…

One Good King

Then the Great Dane became an arrow of smoke in a wind pipe of smoke, so I had to burn the body. He’d always considered himself king of infinite dominions: king of the bone, king of the living room, king of the elevator, king of the field. The ashes I scattered in a park close…

My Box

in terms of design one box is colored orange the one you wanted always is and sits in the bathroom of anyone’s house cause that’s what she wants it’s choosing that wakes things up I wondered how long all that I needed and encountered here would come like a wave not the shake but the…

The Gentle Anarchist

Everything recedes With such grand effort. A morsel On the winter palace floor. In the trees Up ahead, a light goes out, asleep In her summer arms. Hate is born As a monument to our inattention and the blind Greed of disbelief. Even the heroin addict has more Conviction, morbidly patient with his addiction. Work,…

Elegy

César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday April 15, 1938 It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you. Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too. No doubt Juana Vasquez was killed. The killers, poor also, were skilled. And Emilio, they shot him, in the back of the neck, after they made…