Poetry

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

If you add up all the babies floating in space, if you climb to the top of a falling tree, if you drink up all the whiskey             in the Arabian Sea, you will have done something important for the human race, something of nonsense and impossibility.             If you see something disappear without a…

If no one in my family ever spoke of it, if no one handed down? what it was to be born to power and married in a poor country. If no one wanted to remember? the noise of the redcoats cantering? in lanes bleached with apple flowers? on an April morning. If no one ever…

In Donegal we climbed over a cow gate, crossed through a field among hooded crows and earth smells, climbed a stile and stepped onto rain-mucked ground, to enter a small grotto where a stone St. Columba was surrounded by a yellow cigarette lighter, a key ring with green gremlin, a rain-swollen missal, a toy train,…