Poetry

Do I begin at the here and now, or does the story start with the first time my mother took the wheel— the first woman to drive in a country where men are afraid to walk? My mother’s story begins when the steam rises. It ends when it’s ready. Taste it. Does it need more…

translated by Phil Metres This drilling rig lies in the forest tundra. One rises on command, sleeps ears cocked, and waits for the cry “All hands on deck!” at an untimely hour, mindless of the weather. It snows here—but it’s summer in the States, and I’m free to conceive in futile ways what you eat…

Ti Kikit puts on some pink lipstick, stands on the Place Saint-Pierrein Pétionville. For this evening she has borrowed a friend’s plastic barrettes, eleven of them, each pinching a spongy braid at its base, dotting her head with pink. She likes that corner of the ChoucouneHotel—white bougainvilleas overflow from behind the walls, make her feel…

Ain’t no way this river or any other is wide enough to slow us down, no bust-gut half-ass ocean got the means nor the notion to make this anything but fine—                    why bother to slip on or out of that little bit of nevermind tonight cause it don’t matter none to rhythm and blues…

for Geneviève Pastre Early summer in what I hope is “midlife,” and the sunlight makes me its own suggestions when I take my indolence to the river and breathe the breeze in. Years, here, seem to blend into one another. Houseboats, tugs, and barges don’t change complexion drastically (warts, wrinkles) until gestalt-shift dissolves the difference….

Midday. The family sits behind Emmanuel’s corpse. His adolescent granddaughters, self-conscious, their bursting nipples squeezed in white Sunday dresses: three child brides for their grandfather’s funeral. Sweat gathers and tickles in the crease behind their knees. A veil of mosquito netting is spread over the body in the open casket. On the wall above the…

In the photograph of Billie Holiday taken by Mickey Pallas at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, she wears a low-cut evening gown & a fawn-colored stole. Her rhinestone earrings are shoulder-dusters, & her necklace falls almost to her cleavage in heavy leaves of glass stones, or maybe they are real (though paste gems on Billie…

It was born white. It lay in bed Between its father and mother Kicking its tiny feet, so pretty You wanted to suck them and all their piggies. The mother kept looking nervously at the father, Hoping the little lie made him happier. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “It’s you I love. The…

I am praying again, God—pale God—              here, between white sky and snow, by the larch I planted last spring, with one branch              broken at the elbow. I pick it up, wave winter away: I do things like that,              call the bluebirds back, throwing yarn and straw in the meadow, and they do…