Poetry

“I hate what I come from,” says my cousin Shoshana, 22, jawing per always, feather earrings tangling in her light brown hair. Shoshana hangs on to Kinesha, her kid, to stop her running off. Our cousin Deb’s wedding just got out; we’re standing at the bottom of the wedding hall steps. “White people don’t have…

Clearing by this afternoon, and I know you just want to have a good time. Okay, I’ll try to work with that. Out here in the field, then, with this frontier we carry around, there’s no difficulty. It can all be explained: We’re here in the scrub with our                                                       broken hearts and the insects,…

When people smoked, and it hung over the table like magic or like wisps of the talk and the music between them, chicken bones, the best Chateaux, Coca-Cola in glass, Monk’s eyes cut left, Ornette laughing at something off-camera, safari suit and Savile Row bespoke, haberdashery circa ’72 and the black globe is damn near…

A. H. Gorson, 1872–1933 “The Pittsburgh School,” his colleagues called This way of painting the city—river and mill yard And wharf—massed shapes laid against the light That showered up, impasto, from their midst, The way forms dissolved or were cast into relief Or grew more massive in the general noon. Unlike other tonal painters, he…

Cobras rise out of raw pits for them, coils swaying below each diamond head and red forked tongue. When in old robes they walk across a bed of sin, steam hisses as if each footstep held a pod of water and to the murmurs of the crowd, they lift their feet unscathed, and grin. And…

I am translating the world into mockingbird, into blue jay,     into cat-bombing avian obbligato, because I want more noise, more bells, more senseless tintinnabulation,     more crow, thunder, squawk, more bird song, more Beethoven, more philharmonic mash notes to the gods.     I am translating the world into onyx, into Abyssinian, into pale-blue Visigoth…

Of Memory I. Messala Corvinus forgot his own name  II. One, by a blow with a stone, forgot all his learning. Another, by a fall from a horse, forgot his mother’s name and kinfolk. A young student of Montpellier, by a wound, lost his memory, so that he was fain to be taught the letters…

Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat     There’s a poem I’m always trying to write. It always begins the same way.     Oh, listen, listen—     It is the urgency of the words that compels me. I know what the poem is about, it’s about the world and its shining. But what comes after these words is…

I: I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who’s a faggot like you. In the empty parking lot of St. Jude’s Church in Westchester, on a summer day, she lets go and falls to the gritty pavement while I pedal and pedal and glide without training wheels for the first time….