Poetry

In Frost

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…

Driving Out of Providence

I can’t see anything at first. My eyeballs are air-drying in the night’s fake leather interior. It’s like I’m backwards crying, the tears sucked out from behind my eyes into the chamber of my head, sloshing there amongst the already wet deception-sensors and the spongy flowers of incorrect assumptions. But the front slits, the parts…

In the Pardes

It is still dark when the trucks take us to work in the citrus groves, when we pull on our gloves and climb ladders into the trees. In the morning dark, workers go without faces. They are trunks and limbs like the trees they inhabit. I am counting the people like trees, counting in Hebrew…

Afterlife

The front door’s latch slides into its brass socket, the kind of sound that pushes you off, like a flip turn at the pool, your thighs recoil and you’re out past the flags, well on your way . . . only I’m talking about the last lap, when there’s no next turn, the future is…

Preparation for Burial

You’ve told me how they bury the dead in Ghana— how they lay each, finally, in the heart of his life: a twelve-foot wooden cocoa pod or onion for the farmer, chiefs in slick gold eagles two-men-tall, and crab, crayfish, lobster, sanded tuna coffins— because now that you have had me, oh fisherman, you would…

Celebration of the Body

translated by George Evans and the author I love this body that’s lived through life, its amphora shape, its water smoothness, its streaming hair that crowns the skull, the delicate stem of its crystal face ascending exquisitely from shoulders and collarbones. I love my back sprayed with muted bright stars, my translucent hills, wellsprings of…

A Story About America

If it is late Sunday in the brain & sunlight falling on the wall of the Food Court and you tell me your daughter at eighteen months still breast-feeds, and if I with my slightly younger daughter sitting at the next table nod but say nothing, nothing, while you speak of the vicissitudes of cracked-nipples…