Poetry

(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s ever met, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.)   I said     I’m dead you put blankets on my iron lung    said Must be cold    you’re always cold    Dead I said again   you said…

What a name to call your sister—Nada: Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish, where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds of the way to Nathalie where, in French, the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth, the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the word contagious, even Mom fizzing laughter…

as the voice inside the telephone made crying sounds or allergy sounds. It was that time of year—       the particle count high and already a shortage of rental cars and we were all desperate to vacate the premises while you had already done so.             Standing between the voice and my self at the center of…

If description is a living thing, dark cherry hair and glass eyes, tilted away—I want to say something that will look at me. If to memorize is to adore and cannot afford distraction or a socket neck that rotates the head away, if death is turning away, with long brown human hair, revolving like a…

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…

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,…

It is so and so and not the dusty world who drops. It is their mother and not the dusty world who drops them. Why I imagine her so often empty-handed as houseboats’ distant lights rise and fall on the far ripples— I do not know. I know that darkness. Have stood on that bridge…

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…