Poetry

  • Nada

    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 wordcontagious, even Mom fizzing laughteras she said, “Don’t call your…

  • The Conversation Continued

    as the voice inside the telephonemade crying soundsor allergy sounds. It was that time of year—             the particle count highand already a shortageof rental cars and we were all desperateto vacate the premiseswhile you had already done so.                          Standing between the voiceand my selfat the center of ourweather     hovering acrossthe outlandish girthof America and twenty years…

  • from Small Porcelain Head

    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 globe,  from …

  • My Box

    in terms ofdesign onebox is coloredorange the one you wantedalways is andsits in the bathroomof anyone’shouse causethat’s whatshe wantsit’s choosingthat wakes thingsup I wondered howlong allthat I needed and encounteredherewould come like a wavenot the shakebut the aftereffectsand this boxdid saythere was a wayto see thisthinga-loneJuly calledit calculuswhat iscomes in boxeswhat is notcomes in wavesthe…

  • 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…