Poetry

Nicole has this one friend whose hand can burn straight through her clothes & through the skin of her back. Like this, she said, placing her hand on my winter coat, the train above the East River, stalled. Like this, the canary blossoms of Chinese witch hazel flame into this world as astronomers believe dark…

At dark, I make a homesick says a Japanese exchange student in my wife’s ESL class, writing how much he misses his family, his girlfriend, a certain café in Kyoto. I suggest tutoring. But that night, it feels strangely fitting after our second bottle of wine to cap the red pen bleeding cursive from her…

Think of a lizard as a spot of day-glo green, insect-sized, though in all ways perfect. Lost in this kitchen of chrome-souled recipes for oblivion, he looks hard at me. His skin, my skin, our heartbeats tight with trauma, I carry him out where, tack-sharp, two green push-ups, and a cool survey of the universe,…

In the van we are as corks in water, bobbing, filled with air. Earplugs jam up my ears with the simple fact that a secret music illuminates the window-better from my side of the inside seat, crammed up against a housewife, cow-like from Des Moines with wads of Kleenex in her fist, arriving with Broadway…

Clashing paper umbrellas of red and orange. The fur of the moth’s eye- spot centered: wind shakes the poppy, and the poppy shakes the head of the pod shapely as Egyptian skull, bone-dry. Spliced spore, sap and milk: tiny black seeds seamed inside; like the pocket walls’ little wooden veins holding the paper umbrellas up….

The white mouse went first, pink eyes, pink feet, then the ace of hearts, the quarter and half-dollar,     the pigeon, the cat, once the dog, who didn’t howl for a good hour,     wherever he was, our old man’s hands faster than our eyes as we lined up on the picnic table seat to…

You are never what you seem. Like barbeque, you tell me time doesn’t matter, that all things wait. You take long as it takes. Wife to worry, you can sit forever, stewing, grown angrier by the hour. Like ribs you are better the day after, when all is forgiven. Death’s daughter, you are often cross—bitter…

There’s our son at the end of my hook     riding over the Detroit River where Tecumseh’s still rowing     towards his oblivion. This boy we’re casting to the land     of the leaping frogs. My lass lives on the floor     where the fish are frying, her spine snapped in half     the way…

translated by Clare Cavanagh     He dressed in black, like a clerk at an insurance bureau who specializes in lost causes. I’d spot him on Urzednicza rushing for a streetcar, and at Krzysztofory as he solemnly discharged his duties, receiving other artists dressed in black. I dismissed him with the pride of someone who’s…