Poetry

“Quickly or slowly I will go.” —Jean Genet, 1954 My brother is busy packing for jail. I sit on his bed and watch him set aside a blank notebook, pen, copy of Genet’s Thief’s Journal. Jean Genet did some of his best writing in prison, he tells me. I want to say, He was a…

I’ve slipped out early from the Jersey summer home where my family’s vacationing with Auntie Liz and Uncle Duke, whose black Lincoln stinks of cigar, and who, Dad says, is “rich as Crease-us,” who Dad says is “rich as Crease-us.” Fog squirms inside me as I squinch across the sand, gripping my four-foot fishing rod:…

Lemon light, curd of worry. My eye is all iris. Look through this small viewer to penetrate the black shaft. Who’s this? Who’s that? Green goes to yellow over there. The eye wants to be investigated privately. I’ve lost my sense of humor, vitreous jelly, a small island floating under a dark mood; the eye…

Li Po, this is your invite to the Prop Stop, a honky-tonk unreachable except by boat where we’d tether to a buoy and then, barefoot or in flip-flops, tightrope across a rug of skiffs, two weekenders not looking for trouble but ready to battle any slurs the hicks unleash. I keep samurai toothpicks and wine…

Already, his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn’t even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had…

Against an empty sky, the elm is feathered with gold like some apparent wing. On the dark avenue, people pass, lifting their collars. Through the lit windows, empty stairwells and still pianos. Sparrows drive their hearts into grass. The moon pulls aside its curtain as if someone is peering there. Solitude could not find a…

We were young again. Sex as an act of reverence was not yet even imaginable. There was no such thing . . . The point was to push eventually past mere distraction, to achieve an effacement entirely of what, inside us, we couldn’t bear looking long at, no, not a moment longer, what was pleasure…

Three months after my brother’s death, I saw Uncle Vanya in New York. Near the end of the play, Vanya says he’s forty-seven years old. I’d forgotten that, and the line caught me off-guard. Forty-seven was my brother’s age when he killed himself. I wondered if there was something about being forty-seven—the very beginning of…

Around that time, the city grew quiet. You said Don’t hurt me and I said If I was going to hurt you I’d have done it already. We passed a dying store with gem-like windows. A door that banged in the wind. You said Let me go. As in a film of the apocalypse, a…