Poetry

Through blue glass, a table painted blue, roses vermilion, Amber tumblers, candlesticks, a mirror darkening until all Grays in oncoming light. Goats bleat, radioblare, a gunshot. Past the celosia, a tree where yellow birds feed; heat and wind From the mountains. Close your eyes and retinas scald The window crimson, mullions bright of orangeskin Lit…

The Spanish Steps: Keats Departing He hated that he could no longer taste the thick risotto, the paved rosetta rolls soft on the inside, cool globes of fruit plucked from ashy soil, the quivering curd cheese and leafy Puglian greens. All sustenance—even his Chianti’s terroir— mocked him. And so, after weeks of this effrontery, he…

The old cat turns by curving what’s left of his body beyond the careless trees. Does it ache, each twinge and cramp, to wander in hunger, ever fruitless at eye level? Across the lawn the sunlight has nearly given up dragging out its whites like a chapel veil, faking away its sullied past, having come…

Behind the bench the Drive, before the bench the River. Behind the bench, white lights approaching east and west become red lights receding west and east while before the bench, there are paved and unpaved pathways and a grassy field, the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens of a park named for a man…

They’d take her child away, unless he shed more weight. But every time he cried, she fed. More weight. My little niece too light, and snow not dense enough, I squeezed myself behind her on the sled: more weight. So thin her body cannot warm itself, she picks at the meager salad on her plate….

Samurai sword-fighting lesson, Tokyo We’re using the iaito or “practice sword” now               as opposed to the shinken or “live sword” which looks as though it can cut through lampposts                             and is “hungry for the flesh of its owner,” says smiling Sakaguchi-san through a translator,               which is why I’m getting lots of unintentional laughs when I…

Hanoi streets on their last demise do not shine like yellow bananas. The color of brown spotted ripe bananas for straight eleven eves, Coated with layers of night fumes. Seven women on their bicycles steer by a smoggy sundown. Threatening bombs like alarm clocks tick in my ears, As war fumes snatch the pretty red…

Is it too soon to murmur in her ear that I miss someone? The statue of liberty stands so still underneath a rainbow. She won’t mind if I play with the copper flame on her green torch. She can fool around with my liberated heart until it burns into ashes. Let me be the one…

Here is the paint-by-numbers painting of Sitting Bull’s pony she painted. Here is her imitation Navajo loom she used to weave turquoise blankets. Here is her afternoon martini shaker and the prescription Black Beauties. Mahjong tiles click rhythmically by arthritic hands of her bilingual generation. Outside the rain rains sideways, horizontal as this world is,…