Poetry

My mother, dead at my age, unclasps her beaded purse as if entering my house requires a ticket. For twenty-one years, she says, she’s carried the proper ID for pain, waiting to hand it over. She’s dreamed my body crippled in yesterday’s underwear, my breath caught in phlegm’s thick web. In a doubled brown paper…

How do you hold the dead when they’re hammered into a room so flat you can pick your teeth with one corner of the picture? When you were the one at that moment aiming the cheap camera at her wanting to fold her light into a square locket of time. You could see Noah’s Ark…

I’d like, about now, a little small talk, the grown-up kind between long agons some summer afternoon across a table, when what’s not said is not evasion but another language, every empty word and nodded half-sentence a hand laid on the arm. Such sweetness, all that time, you around me, like the rain in the…

I was looking at the Brian Bourke exhibition in the Fairgreen Gallery.? Outside, a man lay collapsed on the ground. It was freaking people out? they kept coming in telling the person? at the desk about the man on the ground. After a while the guards came, they were wearing blue gloves.? They knew the…

Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author Every ball is a bloody, beautiful mask of powerful people. We make up pretzels. I always did like chickens. O, slender fez, mildew perching on its fur. The poet is an oafish celeb on a hood. Of every wondrous power. On a hood. I glance…

At the moment the dog dies some last good leaves your body, Omen. Oh, you, woman without mother, father, lover, this dog with his final sweet breath snout. Harbinger, oh, you: lay thee down in the bracken & brush. In a morning beyond tomorrow morning, by some strength not fully your own, drag yourself to…

For sorrow we have love and the waves dying in.? We can visit our lives in the country of winter trees and blue ruin. ?For the nameless we have silence.? Where tenderness runs out there is tenderness.? A trail descends into the next glen.? Our anti-muse’s hair is the color of loam.? For gospel she…

Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author Radiant white pipe laughing deep down in Jesus’ eyes, the glow is astonished, returns. Wet bandage wrapped around your head, does it hurt? Fra Angelico’s tongue is tin. The ants on it are the hills of Tuscany. What was it that soaked Fra Angelico, nobody…

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…