Poetry

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…

Gats’ tag                    over Shooters’            on DOAs’ covering Dog Tony’s confession                    DOWN WITH MINE, red black green            yellow paint                    shrouding the orange brick of the Brews-n-Chews, first            wall you see after Memphis Avenue crosses the God                    of Abraham off the list of possible            hallelujahs and falls in love…

Returning home to grade five now to Mister Blackwood’s jockey pointer and Mistress Sommerville’s short fingers— their long lessons beneath that mammoth guango tree; to hoppers popping and squirting from grass—our own green- and-brown bubbly; and the dominick fowls coupling nearby. I return now to our cricket pitch, fresh-pressed like cloth, and creased with chalk;…

She wants it and she doesn’t want it: the lace neck and sleeves, the waist so tight she’ll need it refitted the day before the day. She wants and doesn’t want the pleats and puffs and bows, the veil’s force field guarding her face, the train’s long barge dragging behind, the whole creation so elaborate…

Half-awake she hears hooves at the door— a stallion enters her Chamber of Longing. When the door thunders shut she recalls the fury of her childhood; Mother’s venomous beauty, Father, adept at lighting amber in the eye of the sexual god. The listless husband picked out for her has left her without heirs. Beyond that…

It flew in through the kitchen window that summer a few years after the war, the year I turned four or five, that fragile yellow bird Made In Japan whose insides had been sucked out when the bomb fell on Hiroshima. All it required for nourishment was the sweet, cold water I poured into the…

Ozone smell: all afternoon      the rain turned off and on like spray          slurring out a tap. She’s floating along the fern bar window, and the couples      scoring paper tablecloths with crayons,          circles and arrows as they laugh, cigarette-glow and darting eyes, margaritas      all around, salt crust on the glass rims….

translated by Khaled Mattawa   I knelt to tie my shoes in the frost and heard the rattle of an Indian’s throat or maybe the groan of an animal led to slaughter I imagined men bearing their weapons      extinct since The Fifth Article of the Bill of Rights was recited since all applauded it and…