Poetry

Strange arachnid, distant cousin of deer ticks and potato bugs, those armored pellets that live between bark and wood, stone and dirt. Unlike them you wash up hapless on beaches more a bowl than a shoe. You come in squads after mating in the waters of your birth, dragging the useless scabbard of your tail….

Once thought to be extinct . . . lives at depths of up to 1,500 feet . . . dies of shock when brought to the surface . . . almost nothing is known about it . . . —National Geographic I saw you in a book: bubble-eyed and staring, mouth spookily aglow with a…

In the darkness I can see every line of your face. As if you are in my womb. Your fingers feel for its entrance and I am your mother, imagining what you will look like when you are born. When I climb after you into the freshly laundered white duvet, and look at your face…

1 He said it would always be what might have been, a city about to happen, a city never completed, one that disappeared with hardly a trace, inside or beneath the outer city, making the outer one— the one in which we spend our waking hours— seem pointless and dull. It would always be a…

Old man, why shake a wrinkled prick at the young girls? They scream in harmony, scramble off, and then in mottled light, our eyes meet: you, unbalanced on the hoof of an orthopedic shoe, leaning on a stick, gumming your sly grin back into stubble as with a palsy- humbled hand you try to zip…

translated from the French by Anne Atik Small crystal globe, Earth’s small globe, Through you I see My lovely glass bowl. We’re all locked up In your hard strict breast But so polished, so glossed Rounded by light. Like this horse running Or a lady who halts Or the flower on her dress A child…

My mother, given one name, exchanged it for another—Cohen for Carlan, less “Jewish”— and then for my father’s, whose Edelman had lost its E during the war for “business reasons.” What’s in a name? A Rosenblum without the blum would still a Rosen be. And what about me— Girl who met Goy, and gave away…

Where is it, the semaphore branch or bellwether sounding a trail over hill, dale, parking lot . . . leaves down, birds vanished, only a left-over tic and shiver while overhead roar the test flights, free-fall shadows stippling the defunct garden thick with invasives, those exogamous brides. I ask for bread, someone hands me a…

1 The girl who martyred her dolls, sending them To heaven to wait for her arrival, Sentenced them to stones or fire or the force Of her hands to tear them, methods she’d learned From the serious, dark nuns who taught her. She would press a pillow over my face To encourage sainthood. “Now,” she…