Poetry

America you never had a black child   I tell myself you never had a black child   America because I love you still   Because I have to love you, since you’re still   Alive.     But how are you alive   When your black child is dead, who was alive   And you…

On a Russian prank show, a woman gets a call saying her son has been kidnapped for ransom. When she doesn’t send the money, she receives a dismembered finger in the mail. Something’s been tearing the rings off Saturn. The winds too are different, some relationship between positive ion content and a spike in homicides….

try to describe it   even one quick line drawn with unlifted pencil   already wrong

It’s a private collection. My love and I pay more than we can afford to walk through this apartment-turned-exhibit. Our guide leads                     us into the first room, which is full of the sort of dark                   that makes you feel gone, that pulls your color out through   your heels. According to our guide, this…

I do not fear being alone anymore, any more than I fear the “I” in a poem. “I” still do not understand myself completely, and if viewed from the corner of the eye, that’s thrilling. “I” am in a lifelong mystery within my own ownership. Yet no one, not even “I” will witness its unfolding…

is in our hands: in these bones lashed by ligaments, sheathed   in skin. Flex your fingers wide, like folding fans, collapse them in. Muscleless puppets,   they are merciless or tender depending on what moves them. We can train   a single finger to hold a body’s weight; all ten together, to summon a…

In 2020, I, too, walk through life with hand sanitizer, spraying it on everything. Under the horrified microscope, life blows kisses, sticks out its tongue. The neighbors’ kids stick their noses to the fence. So does mine. Don’t lick the fence, Nathan. Lizzie. Josh. I, too, am desperate for a tenuous separation of destiny from…

With Dickinson, Woolf & Duras   I am alive—because I am not in a Room—   Emily’s fingertips felt the Morning Glory & Virginia stood straight between four walls   worrying about the daffodils & the fig trees. A dying fly bouncing on the windowpane, buzzing, struggling—Marguerite wrote—   unknown sky it’s over Is a…

Translated by Kaveh Akbar and Arman Salem   صبه كه خانه را ترک مى كنم، جوانم ،و شب پير به خانه باز مى گردم با اندوهاى هزار ساله ،چهار ديوارى خانه ام آرام و صبور پذيراى پيرمردى است كه سحرگاهان .جوان برمى خيزد   In morning When I leave my house, I am young  …