Poetry

Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1998 Here in a bar on the street of the saint en la calle San Sebastián, a dancer in white with a red red scarf en la calle San Sebastián, calls to the gods who were freed by slaves en la calle San Sebastián, and his bronze face is a…

Whenever she met someone, she secretly analyzed their handwriting. She wondered if these insights were illicitly gained, like wiretapping, but reasoned that graphology was merely close attention to the person without the distraction of interaction. Each element of the psyche had its equivalent mark on paper: the dominant upper zone of one friend indicated spirituality,…

There is nothing more than a painted room and I, a painted woman in it by an open window, a brass sun and a blob of flowers on a cabinet. Crowds come in every day to look at the bold brass color of the sun, the window quite unlike any other; the cabinet with flowers….

All summer and fall the couple floats hand in hand from work at the shelter workshop. Hand in hand in their secondhand sleeveless oxford shirts. With target tattoos on their deltoids. Even in the winter, the same way, hand in hand, although bundled up in secondhand wool coats. One snowy evening, right after they pass…

Is it a vanishing point or is it      Brooklyn into which the cables run      Brooklyn over which these two      these shadowy walkers come      against the shaded rails against      the future in the arcades in the bridge      the parallels above them in midair                                     § Under a clatter of fire…

Along the Avenue of Sultans     the beech and chestnuts are dishabille from cold,     ice-glazed, cloaked in coal smoke from upended barrels     the displaced huddle about. The war is more elemental—     stay warm, scrounge for food, search photos posted     everywhere for lost family: Nedzad Ljuta, 55, last seen,     Milo Medardich,…

I could speak on a hotter than fire riot time and a woman tying up her Detroit promises in a rag. The prodigal child arriving in Muscle Shoals, Alabama—hopefully to sing freedom if only for one day. The migration head swallowing its tail in the year of my birth. I’m telling the truth when I…

So, God takes your child by the hand and pulls her from her deathbed. He says: “Feed her, she is ravenous.” You give her fruits with thick hides —pomegranate, cantaloupe— food with weight, to keep her here. You hope that if she eats enough the light and dust and love which weave the matrix of…

How fitting that he should come back as blues, the whole panoply from indigo to ultramarine on two wings, as cows lumbered up the swale to a hilltop pasture, the sun sunk behind the now truly named Blue Ridge, the world in deepening shadow. How perfect that he should come back as a butterfly, and…