Poetry

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…

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…

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…

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…