Poetry

I cried in public again. Drive, I said to my beloved, drive. I can’t have people watch me cry. It’s bad enough watching people watch me touch fruit at the grocery store. Prickly pear glaring across the sweet heaps. It’s not my fault the citrus is too soft. It’s not my fault you blame me….

Translated by Iain Galbraith   |one’s still clattering in the box, in safekeeping like a child’s first tooth     i and then it is struck in the thickest darkness: ah! here i am. or was.  

Five: Pedigree of watermelons   No one mistakes a watermelon for a meteorite. The theory of watermelons vs. stars is completely irrelevant. But we cannot deny that the earth is a kind of star. Therefore, it’s implausible to deny that watermelons have the lineage of stars.   Four: Watermelon, ancestral hometown   We live outside the…

Big Spring, Arrow Rock, MO   The body records its absences. Water, you take water into it—as presence, as absence, deep into the archive of water you throw your mask. Also, your other mask. We, being matter, are negotiated. I had not thought to be angry, as such. But rage flexes its majestic undoing, its…

And when I awoke, I saw that I was gone. Just like that, the woman I thought I knew, gone into the morning like the mockingbird’s song. After all these years, it was a bit of a surprise, even though I had seen it coming, the way you see a train approaching from afar, crawling…

After Hadrian   Go, little sister, Flesh-flap peeled From blistered heel,   Yellow pellicle Skimmed with a fork Off scalded milk.   Where will you go, How far on wind-whistle To marrow within a creature   Not yet born When I become no longer Your bodied brother?   Vanishing twin, forever young, No reason to…

Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen and Victor Rodríguez Núñez   each morning I wonder at my face: the same as always!   Shouldn’t we reach the dawn with face changed? After a new word our lips should have a different feel!   Only the beloved manages such a miracle face sheds features before the vision…

—worth it? My soul looks back and wonders how I left behind     that tether, which, a burden so long, had become a life more true than my memory of having been   without it: a friend saying, “I love you, but not enough,” then never trying toward enough or letting me go.   The…

Objects heavy enough to break us hang from the thinnest of threads. A stray breeze and down they come. But they say that spider silk is five times stronger than steel, which might be why spiders look so buff. I know that I wouldn’t want to run into one in a dark alley, or any…