Poetry

after James Agee that couple on the road could no more slow their hearts, slough their fear          than could you doff your privilege, un- lace the corset of skin that cuts you to the quick so here you are in the thick of it the sun-bleached air the hard-scrabble beauty of…

Bone dry river. Red sand where the water once ran. Boulders that     were stepping stones. No cattle. The wind is never gentle here, merely patient—the mesas could     tell you that. The vast fields of scrub grass where nothing     we’ve planted ever takes root. The way the rain floods everything and is gone, is like kindness…

Now that archeologists can agree That the fall of Jericho is a fiction (The walls not breached, the houses not burned), We can hope the same for the painful passage About the Amelikites, how the tribe is slaughtered On Jahwe’s orders, as Samuel reports them, “Men and women, children and little babies,” Put to the…

after Elizabeth Bishop She painted interiors mostly, domestic spaces, slightly old-fashioned, simple and practical, places you could make-do comfortably a month or two, an uncle’s cabin with its potbelly stove, a kettle, a spindle chair, flowers like pussy willows branching from a water glass and, strangely,—in the air a mobile—a Calder turning like thought, like…

he pours whiskey on time making a home in sleep one wall is enough for his back yesterday’s paper makes for a ceiling life is postponed for now but the ghosts still roaming his past are always on time panting every moment is an open grave a window to be shut he quarrels with the…

—ágnes nemes nagy every few minutes, through a metal flue the throat bursts into flames from the furnace above my bed. it’s the color of fire. i can see the chokeholds catch. fire ants carry off the heat down the metal ducts, and the vents push out the heat, which falls down the walls behind…

She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight on her face or she will be taken from her house.   She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts her face to the night sky when no one is looking. During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark   and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures…

Despite the moonlessness a glow still lives in the lighter stones, yonder a great seam of quartz beams stars back at the stars. The nightwalking habit he cannot shake, and shunning headlamp or flashlight he goes slow. He knows the way through the woods well, sometimes waits a spell, took a hard fall once it…

Be it so we were among them. Veins in the fingers that remember, will. Every vacant gaze an arc. Drawn against impassible night. The sky trapezes a decade, one letter hurls after another. Huddles nameless on the grid. Where did the child bright swerve among inky knees. The animals press dumbly forward in a crowd…