Poetry

The first café on Valencia Street offers chai and a new book the author of it, his theory of aesthetics is blue and green. The green tastes like another kingdom. The water is in the green. The fruit is in the green. The history of devastation is in the fruit and the water and the…

You sang to me throughout the winter the same desultory song. Each flake of snow, each pellet of ice fell like music to the frozen ground. I lived on crackers in a cardboard house. Got down on my knees and sang to the dirt, “Go ahead, my dear. Eat all his fruit this year. Each…

I would’ve called him Ice Cream, or Monopoly, or Grand Slam: something I especially liked. He’d have played catch with me when no one else was home. He might have come from planet Fev, where God taught him kung fu. He might have traded crescent kicks with Christ. Or been a girl. Maybe on Fev,…

Your John Wayne days and ways are on the wane. Who needs another gangster, when this world is jammed with gangsters, brilliant, slick, insane? You whose thing is you’ve been boyed and girled and worked and played, then turned and stretched and squashed. What’s with it with you anyway? Ideas you spew about your innocence…

—main character in Spike Lee’s film She’s Gotta Have It How many nights I have lain in bed thinking of you, Nola Darling. I climb the fire escape from two floors below to see you soaking your stained panties in the sink, frying your liver and onions. I have seen you naked in the bathroom,…

Still slight under heavy folds of pleated smock, she swells with talk of midwives, queasy mornings, while he changes the subject, changes the subject as if by pulling the other way he could stop the drift down her chosen path. Each seems to shrink in the sure, clear flame of the other’s want as the…

Already at work—squatting, preening— the Cambodians weed the cranberry bog. They’re close to the earth like mourning doves foraging below the bird feeder—the last to come, to take what others dropped. There’s no moaning. They’re chatty, a giddy cackle carries among them while they move together. They’re alive as the frogs that ga-dung in the…

At night the earth’s flesh shifts, which makes the house sigh in its sleep, which sends a shiver through the wood-bones of my bed, which makes me stand up in my dream and climb a hillside flush with gorse and may. I lie down on the peak and feel the kick-punch-kick, and wonder what the…

for Nana What’s most fantastical almost always goes unrecorded and unsorted. Take spring. Take today. Take dancing dreamlike; coffee your night, creameries your dream factories. Take walking as a dream, the dearest, sincerest means of conveyance: a dance. Take leave of the notion that this nation’s or any other’s earth can still be the same…