Poetry

The difference between my house in Pennsylvania and my house in Massachusetts is the difference between fish stinking in one place and birds in the other. The dead and bygone locusts in both places attest to this, and the salt water bringing the sea back into my inland river. Suffering being equal, I am happy…

     apprenticeship The difference is always road and you can measure it with rocks or spiders. The street signs are blue, the poor lie naked in the parks. The work of fire never ends and angels build cities of grass. Someone will follow a bird to a forest where child twins are slain. No king…

translated by Martha Collins and the author Are they Julio and Carmen? Or José and Magreta? Are they from Ethiopia, or Tanzania? From the Congo, or somewhere else? On the beach under the moonlight They lie side by side Like two exhausted seals Thrown from the sea by storm waves. Their black skin glistens in…

Because my Spanish is chips-and-salsa simple, and I am desirous of improving upon it, and delighted whenever I can puzzle out on my own some new word or phrase, I am listening in on the conversation of the two Cuban men next to me at the counter of the plumbing supply store in Little Haiti,…

First a startle of fragrances to remind me where I am: turf smoke blown through drizzle, oystery brine-tang over Quay Street. An umbrella-raking gale. Then mind-blowing blue above the town for a nanosecond       until my airport-bound rented windscreen               spatters with the weather’s wet           splash of anticipation and by an astral lope I’m…

Sunday. The bells, as expected. I cannot help it if I rise, if finding the room too fraught with light—all of it, the white walls, the rinsed notion (always almost inside then just out of reach) of God, your body gleaming in sleep where the sun falls on it and away from, falls on and…

Do I begin at the here and now, or does the story start with the first time my mother took the wheel— the first woman to drive in a country where men are afraid to walk? My mother’s story begins when the steam rises. It ends when it’s ready. Taste it. Does it need more…

translated by Phil Metres This drilling rig lies in the forest tundra. One rises on command, sleeps ears cocked, and waits for the cry “All hands on deck!” at an untimely hour, mindless of the weather. It snows here—but it’s summer in the States, and I’m free to conceive in futile ways what you eat…

Ti Kikit puts on some pink lipstick, stands on the Place Saint-Pierrein Pétionville. For this evening she has borrowed a friend’s plastic barrettes, eleven of them, each pinching a spongy braid at its base, dotting her head with pink. She likes that corner of the ChoucouneHotel—white bougainvilleas overflow from behind the walls, make her feel…