Poetry

What’s it like now to be shot in the foot by yourself, when you were aiming elsewhere and didn’t want   any kind of trouble? How else could you frustrate yourself more, what with your foot oozing blood,   and the gun smoke clouding the air so you can’t think, and that bird you wanted…

mistranslation after “Fellah” by Taha Muhammad Ali   You: Beethoven I mean to say: Mr. Beethoven I don’t get it: I spend the day removing obstacles, Me and all my neighbors, we’ve covered all the bases But behind our backs, on the phone, the sun still going up and down There are those who hurt…

Lie down long beside your confirmation number And be my garden The orders of magnitude will mount             And thunder past us This is the part When you put everything away                 Where no one can tell The difference between the wind And a human being             The haze has migrated to the other eye…

Eleven years ago I wrote a poem about looking for feminine protection in El Corte Inglés in Madrid. It seems I was always starting my period in cities I didn’t know well. The first time I went to Miami, for the book fair, I felt a cramp, then a squirt, right as I was about…

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?…

on the wall by the fireplace we can fill it      with stones, flowers, toenails, pebbles of shit     or scat      or something else Anglo-Saxon   and indispensable. No books on Texas      birds, no botany, the rock is called a batholith, stands 1,825 feet, a large, solid granite dome          where white men fled captivity,…