Poetry

  • A House Sparrow

    Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…

  • Does She Have a Name?

    The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …

  • The Van

    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…

  • Poppies

    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….

  • Essaouira

    translated by Laura Rocha Nakazawa That night, the wind was a lament, a daring wound above the voice of the sea. That night, someone called me amid deep darkness to take me to the Melah, the Jewish quarter. Inebriated, I walked, covered in white tulles to protect me from the fine and savage sand. Alone,…

  • Modern Prototype

    We melt the old thing into the new thing. Tongs, a ladle the size of a man’s head I fill with thoughts of molten steel. Fire below the cauldron, in our cigarettes, in the right hand of the man coming back from the bathroom with his skin mag. He’d tell me, were I to ask,…

  • The Statue

    As a child, as little more than an infant still learning numbers and words, I went to sleep after praying for uncles and aunts, for the living and the dead, with one hand in my mother’s hand through the bars of the cot, while I held in the other a bronze statuette of Mary given…

  • The Deer

    are tentative. Of course. To be an animal is to watch. Is to think about eating all the time. I watch them be so watchful. My window takes them one by one through trees winter strips down to a few species.                              When I saw the deer, I was beginning to type, not it came…