Poetry

I go back to the scene where the two men embrace & grapple a handgun at stomach level between them. They jerk around the apartment like that holding on to each other, their cheeks almost touching. One is shirtless, the other wears a suit, the one in the suit came in through a window to…

1 The Roxie is down the street from the locked ward where I left my husband. I took the children to the movies that night, a comedy about the war: in the candy dark, the laughs went off like explosions. Here’s the letter he left me, a green crayon scrawl. These are the sayings I…

I wanted the Persian Isfahan rug with the all-over garden of paradise design, the one with one thousand two hundred knots per inch. Its sinister history was of no importance to me, irrelevant the conditions of the weavers, whether they were hungry or suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. I loved the way the tree of…

The Greeks said: never to be born is best; next best, to die young in a noble cause. “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Villon asked. “Where are yesteryear’s snows?” is, I guess, the phrase in English. Villon spoke in praise of women not born when the Greeks said: “Best not to exist at all.” Yet…

Our accord’s a ruin. One swipe across the cutting board scatters it. Away’s where I’m going and if that’s blood boiling, leave it on. The heart’s a saucepan, not a cauldron, the pint-size heart. It can’t harm you unless you’ve made illicit decisions. Have you made illicit decisions? Grit your wisdom teeth and don’t expect…

The bullets took their thuggish way, and like words once sounded couldn’t be unsounded. Was I like him? Very sadly, with immense and quiet bitterness one by one the blood members of your body— daughter, grandson, and granddaughter— have heard you say I should never have married him, thereby unsaying us. Small and excitable, he…

Curb your excesses, for I change and get absorbed too quickly. See? Already I’m taken in. Be like water, I told myself, strange aspiration for a vegetable, but by nature I was cold and humid. Now I quench thirst. This makes me useful, though primarily for the young in southern regions. Here in the north,…

All the familiar contours chasten. The lake is a pool of dark thought. There, the clouds bear pale change, gathered in contemplation. The lake is a cup of gray fear: your body in the cold dawn upturned, and my own drowning eye opened on the floating light. And I can see the pines unclasp each…

Their nature? Sanguine, warm and humid as blood, and they comfort the heart. Please help yourself. The names I can’t pronounce—something like paradixani, gerosolimitani. Here, have a taste. I used to be less liberal. I’d cling, think flesh of my flesh. But where does that lead? Collapsed brown mouths the deer won’t eat come winter….