Poetry

What he hated most about family Was the depth and the duration Of the emotion, the delimiting Nest, net, and trap of it all… Ours was not a poor family, Caught in that single word poor, But ours was an ascetic family, Caught in that one word. We had our dignity. We had Books and…

A gas flare throbs, an ignition Urged out from the interlacing steel. Over the refinery, it hovers, So long as pipelines rush raw oil Thrilling through A circulating need, so long As a man must be propelled Forward & his engine filled. The burning occupies the black air Like a moth transfixed— Still living, fluttering,…

At Wellesley it was a henna-haired Swiss who had just come out, who, one night, when I was tracing a table of constellations, gathered enough courage to sit on my desk and tell me, I like women. She became an idol of that sisterhood, which meant she rarely came back to our room to sleep…

for Chris You make it and I wonder about it listening to what you navigate and sound in the midst of the orchestra with your clarinet enchanted—though you may not be—by what’s around, wrapping you in a cloak, complete or torn sometimes embroidered and elaborate, gold-edged while I peer down at you from a box…

What we have is shaped, layered, planned, like the twig of a bending sprout covered with earth so it can grow, the buds predicted by the shoot that we can see and understand, that we can seldom do without, that only we can ever know in all its style, within the root. Some want to…

The toothache drills a hole to the suitcase filled with singed clothes of the woman who died in a crash. Further inside, a shelf I made when I left my first country, plank I put myself on with my wooden doll and wooden dog.

Swear you’ll go as deep as you possibly can, my wife said before I set out on the submarine voyage. I promised her and donned my gear. The paparazzi followed me down, but one by one they drowned. Starfish nibbled at their flesh and little bubbles rose cheerfully, heralding their demise. I was too busy…

He thumbs a corner of Verlaine,            plucks those pages like a dulcimer, even when the train lurches            not looking up from there but pawing at the air for a handhold,            and my God! what a head— stamped from some stuff…

The morning Jacob called us to the field and said he would take us back to the land of his father, Isaac— the one led up the mountain by his father to be bound and knifed and burnt for love of the god of his fathers, I thought, I will not. I would stay, I…