Poetry

Wolves

Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah The birds’ departure from his heart leaves the plains white where the story is white and sleep is white and silence is the caller’s icon. A laugh of sand will sprout when the door is opened from fear’s angle, a hymn for the grand winter, and the voices of…

Universal Movers

We move the same packed box from house to house, off the ancestral farm, now overgrown with glorious, inedible rhododendrons into the rented basement of a mud-lot seeded for next spring. We sweat through shirts to lug it six flights up to a Brooklyn flophouse with a view of the subway station, ship it freight…

Honey and Holofernes

Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author I’ve invented a machine that, as soon as a goldfinch opens its throat, starts dumping bags of concrete inside. Who licked the candies into concrete, we don’t know. Who then brought the concrete to life, we don’t know. The goldfinch sails. The goldfinch sings. Where…

Sing-a-long

Just a few days before her final trip to the ER— after she’d given up bingo and picking up her phone, refused to get out of bed or leave her room, living on a few spoons of broth and saltines she’d crushed with the side of her curled fist? while they were still in their…

Madrigal of Knowledge!

There are only two things in the world I don’t know. The square root of 77 is 8.972. The capital of             Michigan is Kalamazoo. Most everything is simple if you know where to go. The Internet is a gold mine. The dictionary is good too,             and there are still only two things in…

My Philadelphia

Philadelphia can be called thicker— home of W. C. Fields and Governor Rendell. I’ve been flying barrier islands and the Jersey Shore stretching to land in this place with some shoulders and other padding. Has Philly sold out its paranoia? No, it stayed thick, a thick knee, a thick elbow, thick ribs, thick toes, thick…

Anniversary

at your marker (they call it a marker) a footstone hipper than headstones           earlier mapquest led to metro north           google to the most reliable cab service in peekskill I bring wheat      tall dry half-live stalks           bought the day before           (new york has everything)           no one questions the harvest shooting from…

The Leopard

She feels the shape of another animal three trees ahead, & raises her left front paw. Dew trembles on each blade of grass as a snake uncoils among the leaves. She’s a goddess in a world mastered by repetition & unearthly cadence, pacing off light hidden in darkness. She eases down her right paw, slow…