Poetry

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…

In between “host” and “glint” is ghost. A “hint” will hiss next to “guess.” For example also the virtue of frost is moisture And in icicles, glaciers or in a body’s cooling gestures the centuries pile up. Bone too, keeps a ballad interior. Lacuna if it could speak would be laconic. Winter seethes and wrecks us,…

after Gwendolyn Brooks       I. 1981. When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on barstools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is…

“Do all dudes have one big testicle and one little tiny one?” Hieronymus asked hiking up his poodle skirt as we staggered Down Main Street in our getup of wigs and pink bonnets The night we sprayed NEGROPHOBIA all over the statue of     Robert E. Lee guarding the county courthouse, a symbol of the bondage…

Just as I’m going into the native seed store, where the ancient seeds of the world’s various peoples are kept and sold so that they can perhaps root in tomorrow’s ground, a young man who was just on the other side of the street, yelling furiously at his stoned friend on the other, quiets the…

I. In the absence of reliable ghosts I made aria, Coughing into emptiness, and it came A west wind from the plains with its arbitrary arsenal: Torn sails from the Ganga river, Bits of spurned silk, Strips of jute to be fashioned into lines, What words stake—sentence and make believe, A lyric summoning.   II….

You have been here before and you remember the empty streets, the fire, and after that the stairs crowded with bells. This pregnant woman was your wife, she laughed—and whispered the story to her belly: how did the deafness come? To the sound of bells— you bent to tie your shoes to the sound of…

Last night’s rain has filled the fields with cornflowers, blue-bright as moons in children’s books, all milky light. They seem, my father says, the kind of color that could show up in the night. Cornflowers wilt in heat. By noon the sun will burn the fields green, as if no bloom had known them. I…

Here at El Paso airport I wait for Valentina who will take me to the other side to read poems like this one in Juárez Valentina is late soldiers are standing in line laughing teasing one another I was going to write: like hyenas about to smell their prey but I shouldn’t dehumanize them right?…