I woke up this morning with my mouth full of words Like “Crenellated battlements,” and cranciousness And bicycles with “derailleur” and flywheels and tappets. These words must be escapees from where they grew bored. Stuck in the same old sentences they decided to break out And now they are fugitives in my mouth and ears….
Avila, 1982 When the civil guards approached me and asked me for my papers, I recalled the face of a sunny saint being disemboweled on the rack. Widows in perennial black, addicts of prayer, find comfort here the way monks in hair shirts must take to penance, or me, addled in my blissed-out days in…
I didn’t know then how couples flow into the space around each other— how Max’s sweet exuberance was only made possible by Rose’s bitter chill. Who knew what that whole generation of refugees had gone through? I knew nothing about them— only that Max had been to Alaska, had prospected for gold. Said words like…
The brown boy hits me, but says he is sorry. The brown girl, his sister, says it’s because he likes me. I say, Yuk! He likes me? Well, I hate him. The black girl pinches me and says, Scaredy-cat, tattletale, little pussy . . . I dare you to hit back. The white girl grabs…
Where any of us is going in tomorrow’s reckless Lexus is the elemental mystery: despite instructions he left behind, Houdin- i, who could outwit ropes and chains, padlocks and steam- er trunks, could extricate himself from underwater metal crates, could send forth, he was certain, a message from the other side, never cracked the curtain…
The souls we carry hunger for our light. They who feel unfortunate, close in on the fields, convene around happiness. They hear the sound of it like laughter, on roads, through rain-blurred trees, the smell of it boiled through bones and cartilage, the taste of earth deep and darkly rooted. Drawn to those sleeping skin…
In my little museum of erotica I would place your feet. I would place your feet sandwiching my feet. Their softness. Their heat. And I would place your arms as you do mornings, beneath my neck. around my waist, tugging me towards you, my back to your chest. This well-beingness I would set on a…
translated by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes No matter how much he pondered the Virgin’s pregnancy, how much his thoughts went back and forth, his heart and troubled soul couldn’t figure it out. —traditional Filipino verse narrative of the life and death of Christ Chisel, plane, and hammer, to you I’ll whisper my bitter…
Arturo stomps the heel of his boot and tells me: Every pinche minute I mess up a red ant. That’s no good, I tell him, me the young man in the next row, The shadow of my hoe cutting weeds in Boswell’s beet field. Arturo says: every super pinche half-hour I see this squirrel spin…
No products in the cart.