Poetry

Did he save them from the Holocaust to profit his soul, or to make a profit? Did he make them his slaves to protect them from the Holocaust, or to protect his investment? “He represented the German system—a guy who could make money.” He made them slaves. He saved them. He profited. Was there any…

You said she kept leaving you for a dentist, a gay prostitute whose boyfriend has AIDS, and the short-order cook who bruised her. She needed someone pretty in her bed. You’d always wait, stay home until she threw rocks to break your window, begging to be let in. She taught you to want bath water…

Now they lug in eggplant, zucchini peppers, honey, apples, cheese the college jazz band snakes through slide trombone punching October blue snare snipping away the seconds. Above, the golden dome, a manmade sun and atop, “Wisconsin,” a golden woman. Children roll on the Capitol lawn leaves litter their clothes, hair while parents slip loaves and…

You are blessed in life, she says, touching a match to a single spicy balsamic leaf, but if you do not change your direction, you will end up where you’re going. On her kitchen counter laboratory, Ah-Pauh simmers sweet oil from parasitic trees. She asks the thousand-armed goddess to throw protection over me—small fish my…

Mama’s eyes are turning to clouds, she forgets the way to the grocery store, broccoli rots inside the bread box. Some days she does not know me, these shoulders she’s sponged in the river, the baby hands she taught to hold water. Unpinning her cinnamon-roll plaits, she’s chasing light-bugs for diamonds and playing pity-pat with…

1. Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city, I’m going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta Right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit Out of an…

for Chris I’m a penny fallen from heaven’s corner pocket, anybody’s overcoat, pick me up and I’ll bring you all kinds of luck. I’m a fence burning down, love locked in a box, I’m a map of hand-me-down tomorrows, the last but one, or anywhere you never wanted to go, but now. I’m a clock…

Because we cannot be together we live in six notes of Vietnamese where no one can understand us except those who speak in tongues and the language of birds Because we cannot be together we boil the root of the telephone cords torn from the black soils of sleep hold negatives up to the light…

Don’t think that being a left-handed nightingale was all legerdemain or that I am that small angry bastard who hates whores, only I disguised it by laughing; or that it’s easy leaving a restaurant by yourself and holding your other hand against the bricks to keep from falling; or anybody can play the harp, or…