Poetry

Men bleed without insight in prison? A hand on neck starts a fight in prison. He held the night’s air in his fist and screamed, then sent word by scribbled kite in prison. Steve’s eyes broke open to the bluest black, then he sported homemade tights in prison. Marquette splintered, deranged pigeon insane. He learned…

I imagine he sank like copper, a bright flutter, but I wasn’t there when they pulled him out. I only know the splintered dock where they laid his featherweight, and the way Keith’s hands shook hours later, still cool from cradling him beneath the dark bulk of the Palisades. Now, autumn falls around us in…

Grant to my brother that he come here unharmed. Grant safe passage, that he arrive whole and with his eyes open. Grant him refreshment of breath, yellow sand beneath his feet, and in his hands a few coins, a few white crystals of salt. Please grant to my brother,         lost now among winds,        …

In 1972, the Bangladeshi state adopted a policy to accord a new visibility to the 200,000 women raped during the War of Independence by eulogizing them as birangonas (war heroines), though they were frequently ostracized by their families and social circles. —Nayanika Mookherjee Do you remember what you were doing when they came for you?…

First just a few, then more, then more— this one a gift, this one a pity adoption. They flutter as she passes. They call when she comes home. She strokes them, soothes them. They flap, agitated. She tries to nap, but their cries are constant. They are starving. They will not be placated. She says…

Venice, 1448 Installed in a high wooden pulpit, the professor Drones on aloud from his book, was it Stephen of Antioch’s spin on Abbas’ translation of Galen the Greek? The music of it all, anyway, the muscular rhythms, Phrase knit to phrase with the delicate Sinew of assonance—! The students in the foreground milling about,…

That’s what my mother called her dimestore pads of Irish Linen, each sheet with its trace of red gum threaded along the top, thumbed off for elegance. For special, she’d say, to be used for letters, not lists, to be used to write about the weather one day at a time. But she got only…

His plane was scarcely more than canvas stretched across board. Gunned down by a German Fokker onto no-man’s land, my father crawled under cross-fire to a crater and sprawled in on the dead. Only once did he mention the maggots and stench in a world that slammed up too soon. That night, between the sizzle…

She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…