In the village, we kids picked flowersfor the mass grave colorful fragrant weedsblossoming reeds and grasses All the schoolchildrenwere locked in the school that day Huddling around cow dung cakeswe made small fires didn’t entrust to adultsour wild ghost stories Nothing remained of the schoolbut a mossy outline I tried to learn their namesthere were…
after Attila József In a garden of my own makingThe trees and I will soon be waking.Shyly, I’ll while away the hoursPlanting seeds and tending flowers. And so I’ll sow and so I’ll reap,Planting, planting in my sleep.So what if all the flowers are weeds?Don’t all of us derive from seeds? I’ll drink my milk,…
I entered someone else’s suffering and when ISurfaced I looked behind me into the sheen of it. We’d been to the bottom, the muck of scales and femursOf trees. I’d communed with the dead, my dead, to make Sense of the sunless depths. They rocked me—father,Grandmother, friend—in arms of slippery weeds that moved Like flames….
Meant to nail the iron rose wreath, the seashell macramé, the twig pentagramto my backyard fence. Forgot the hammer, the nails in the glass jar. Planted green things—spearmint, sweet basil, lavender—and deepmaroon-to-black newly noirs, white impatiens in steelboxes. I feared the mold growing from rainy day after raw rainy day. Dug down into the boxed…
I part the wild horse’s mane the arms rise and knees sinkand outside the window car hoods line the DQ parking lotmy knees sink and elbowsbend as I’m told energy held inthe muscle is memory forming but when I rise the nightdoes not alleviate the heat outside the hotel where I did not expect to be — not lost and…
For a few months, I lived in a place that was cold. When I stood at thefront door, in the foreground I saw a lawn covered with snow, in themiddle ground a house being built, and in the background mountainsthat were white and craggy, like clean teeth. The house being built wasa box of raw…
I I learn how to breathe underwater—spring vacation, 1978. Aunt Nayyer takes me to the Caspian where the stray herrings die by the sable shore. She raises her arms in prayer for all the bounty we haul home and feast for dinner. Each fish the size of my hand. All brine and grit.Carcasses stack over our palms,their dorsal fins…
slapped me todayopen hand swiftlyacross my face like he did would gunshot flame set the block the nightsky alight i don’tknow why i’m not the only one who mattersthe only one sittingon the bed head in handsshoulders tremblingas water does beforeit falls from a leaf a reply not rushed me stood before me alonei nearly…
When the air is this soft, when insects and birds are the soundtrack, when your skin is dried salt from the sea, and your clothes are strung out on a line in a yard whose path to the road is familiar and empty and open to an ocean you hear butcan’t see, whose wash is alive witha friend who is…
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