8. Two Girls That day I reached and swept the flies from the face of a Vietnamese girl on the bed of a pickup truck, until I realized she was dead and stopped, is the day I will never forget. Of all days, that is the day. They crowded her eyes, until her eyes were…
You can’t abandon me now when I’m dead and need tenderness. —Zbigniew Herbert I. Cut Photograph: 1941 My mother cared most about beauty. Its absence hurt her like sickness, like loss of life. So she cut the photograph where I ride on my father’s shoulders at that place on his chest below the heart where…
Swept to the bank of the Ganges, what seemed to be charred wood were flies clustering a child. A sin to push it in the water? I wasn’t sure, and left the face to its slow dissolve. It took hours walking home, dust darkening my feet to the sandals’ leather. Perhaps the mynah birds would…
in spring revises bright calligraphies of grass. Small revisions. Not like winter’s chop- logic. For you who seek in nature resurrections: each green shoot corkscrews a rotten leaf, and though our DNA’s the same, my twin’s not me. Wind’s a death wish rumor hissed from green to yellow head all summer. I wish I’d gotten…
The ocean all day turning its pages, as if the swelling would come, finally, to an end; as if the ending this time would be a different story. It’s that the gulls cried or laughed when I passed them. And the gritty itch of sand in every corner, every crevice, every fold. The air…
on the art of William H. Johnson i. Florence, South Carolina—1915 Harlem she said or he thought she said she and every other hotel in town. Stopped dead on the wooden walk outside her white porte-cochère he watched the red sun roll into her rooftops. She said Harlem or was it the bark of steam…
I say Jason, look at this book, but feel like I’m in a dream he’s having, a ship at anchor off the island he is that dispenses words like boats to shore. He knows better than to talk. So, I ask, Jason, do you like to read? and lift the cover, letting a few pages…
She wakes, alone, on the cruise ship’s highest deck, lying in a chair, beneath the night. Despite his promises, he isn’t there. The night is cool with patchy, floating fog; the ship, deserted, seems to drift without direction. Tonight, she’d rushed into Brindisi, the harbor city of pestilence and quakes, and bought her ticket and…
After Kirs in tall glasses at the Café Dupon, we roamed the cobblestone streets, each storefront window a stage, empty save for its props and the dark behind them. A boulangerie every block, five blocks to the bus stop. He’d persuade me to drive in his Peugeot, a silver compact stick shift. Angers at night,…
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