Poetry

translated by Jennifer Grotz   When you appease my heart, I’ve nothing left to say, my agitated words fall fast asleep. I don’t even remember my petty dramas— your lullaby sings me awake. Others assure me I imagine this, that to receive you the wound in my chest must stay fresh. And that the anguish…

My wife’s younger brother took heroin and died in the bed he slept in as a boy across the hall from the one she slept in as a girl. He sold the pot he grew in their basement and she’d leave work to take him to rehab but their father was the unhappiest child in…

Here are boys, still weak. When they speak                                                                   snow falls from their lips. Pale of hand and cheek, the motors that whirred in their chests have failed. + Their new city—buildings like a scrim                                                                  a god unfurled for them so it waves in the wind. + Lovely, strange, and chill. The boys are…

The heart of the builder the wild talent, the so-called genius of the artist is largely overrated. He has been building walls for 60 years now. Two things are important. Endurance (Strength is useful but overrated; leverage can accomplish at least as much as the imprecision of brute force), and material, the second thing, even…

When I was a Jersey girl I hid my Jersey ways. Predictable as milk, I paled predictably when New Yorkers said: Jersey? and they were right. They despised my yellow Jersey plates, my Garden State cockeyed, solipsistic, anesthetized take on pig farming in that isolate, Secaucus, my bowling with extended family at the Elizabeth Lanes—…

To the locusts that blur the tiny lyres of their shells, I leave my blindness at the end of day. To the distant whistle of the train at dusk, I leave the smoke in a girl’s hair. To days I dipped my body in, I leave my only shadow. To the gravel road that crackles…

Syringes, ampoules, feathers, finger foods, driftwood, A purple sheen on the water, obscene eddies, mud on the banks     and pine nests. This morning I saw another omen: there’s always something,     usually just one thing, An egret or an ibis. But it’s the things in conjunction that make meaning. Five days ago there was…

I left my house of silence and wrecked my body on the beach of travel. An ocean of bus lines, planes with twin engines, and rubber balls that tumble down stairwells. The road chooses women with shopping bags and greasy faces. It pushes them toward the distance of gas stations and beer stands. Because she…

I. What appears untidy and lacking in design is in fact intentional: quiet milkweed beside the conflagration of red fireweed; the brackish Schuylkill feeding stately oaks. John knew the author lays his borders, then steps back. General Washington, strolling the overgrown river trail, pursed his lips; what sort of father lets his seed run wild,…