Poetry

What is this thing that must be won by experience? It has me walking on sidewalks next to myself, both selves watching women and men coming toward us, the fruit vendors and lovers—   Why does everything occur in pairs, the glance and the glance averted, the gaze and the gaze returned? A woman drops…

—from Definitions   Freudenschreck, or “intense pleasure-fright”—leave it to the Germans To coin a word for the fleeting sense of being seized By such an inexplicable joy it verges on terror. Or maybe it’s inexplicable terror pretending to be joy. Also, a physical phenomenon: neurologists say the amygdala Glows red as a jack ball whether…

1. Woke up early to write, killed flies instead.   2. In the pot, I boil bones with huājiāo and fennel, attempting to reproduce a past taste. The result is a gray diluted broth, ghost enough to conjure.   3. On Facebook you can tag a picture as “my grandmother.”   If you hover your…

You will want to go back. Not right away, perhaps, not as you run towards the train’s open doors   and not during the nightmiles in which the distance collapses under the wheels into ordinary darkness.   And maybe not while laid across the row of empty airplane seats, the young Chinese couple helping you…

—after Wrecked Archive B-45HqDHfqp by Patty Paine I am inching along the Mackinac Bridge, passenger in a van. Through the frosted window, the sun is a yellow explosion, blown open, its blood a sulfur-yellow sheen that pools in the distance on top of Lake Huron. The clack-clack-clack of the tires over the bridge’s steel grates sounds…

—after Wrecked Archive B-VAYKjKGqG image by Patty Paine Initially, I think the clown is in charge, because he is tweeting nothing but commands—no salutations, no jokes or puns or other clown-speak—but I am wrong. “I know who all of you punks are!” he yells, shaking his fist, clutching a list that he thinks identifies the children,…

The world returns a bit on the fifth Alone Together day.                                             Amina’s teacher sends assignments over email.                     A friend calls with good news: Eileen got the Good Letter, the happy one from the school she wanted.                                         We return to the endless task of freeing the front yard from weeds, and neighbors come by and stand…

                                                            how much of the hand is fist my father asks—                                                   for him it’s half what you’d expect—the tape’s temper                between splint and split knuckles: symbol’s useless rigor;                                         the long ride home—                                                             for the boy with the torn lip, it’s half what you’d expect                                  …

maybe it’s too early for glow, slow as                                                                       she left our house one day, a cloud slung like what a soldier might carry                                                                       a bolt against a red door, and never came back home—I’ll never understand why                                                                       not once more to gather _________ my mother, for example, carried                                                                       the May lilacs, vulgar in their epithet,…