Poetry

but don’t read this poem whose title implies I think you’re old but you are at least older than me time passing makes everyone old unless death and I don’t want that which is not to say I’m terrified but don’t not read this poem because you’ve died! I’d rather insult you what I mean…

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…

for Sangchen Tsomo   Today it looks like a radiant darkness within the body and the sound of the dove in morning and evening and how the machine of my mind is never silent and how I pray for silence like a rain cloud combed through branches. Or the dove’s slow sound above last year’s…

1. A cage can be a body: heart in the night quieted slightly; mind, a stopped top. Clock spring set. Hand in motion. The fact of the hollowed nothing head. How did we come to this? Inch by inch. I was born, borrowed from the beast; I was now property in a country where chain…

At the age of eleven, he composes a short treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies. Finds it easiest to hear people when they’re asleep: a sound that comes from their dreams. Secretly takes his pulse several times a day in flesh and in vain. Pascal despairs of the husk, delights in the spark, fears…

I’m only a human. Always is only in me as long as I last. What do I want? Don’t ask. We forget who we are. Conformists all alone looking for a fake mirror and finding it in some poker nobody sitting across the aisle. To be like some other and feel that. While I am…

Sometimes, I’m tired of being a mother, weary of holding her in my mind, her words brighter than mine, the light’s movement on the rock. Look, I say, Listen, to what my daughter said. (tired of being) reasonable and calm, answering to Mom and how sweet (the sound) my name in her mouth, her mouth…

When they run out of meat                men disappear. I chew         my hair, a kind of fullness that is kind, a thread                soup. A nest gathers         its strands inside me. The dead hatch, translucent-eyed,                wire-boned, small         whistling through beaks. We share our (secret)                feast, miles of hair to keep         us warm. I rock on my heels…

Because my son is as old as the stars Because I have no blessings Because I hold tangerines like orange tennis balls Because I sit alone and welcome morning across              the unshaved jaws of my lawn Because the houses on my street sleep like turtles Because the proper weight of beauty was her eyes              last…