Poetry

You are blessed in life, she says, touching a match to a single spicy balsamic leaf, but if you do not change your direction, you will end up where you’re going. On her kitchen counter laboratory, Ah-Pauh simmers sweet oil from parasitic trees. She asks the thousand-armed goddess to throw protection over me—small fish my…

Mama’s eyes are turning to clouds, she forgets the way to the grocery store, broccoli rots inside the bread box. Some days she does not know me, these shoulders she’s sponged in the river, the baby hands she taught to hold water. Unpinning her cinnamon-roll plaits, she’s chasing light-bugs for diamonds and playing pity-pat with…

1. The one she loves she hates. And too late, she says, for the thing love’s become to let her loose from its grip. They take it to the hills. Green tent in blue mountains. They’d bought themselves fishing licenses, and the conversation began on trout—cutthroat and Dolly V’s—names bruised and asthmatically deep inside the…

I had been awake since balmy Tokyo on a train from lights of pornographic neon to places in silent mountains I will never see again. Across from me in the sleeper an old man undressed the veins in his legs looked like green lightning in hairless, gold skin. He wrapped himself in a robe moved…

In the ambulance a child is turning blue around the edges. The sweep of time has lifted up her life and we are a blur of hands trying to refasten her to it. Two fingers press a rhythm on her birdcage chest. The muscle clenched inside has a hole too wide. Time sweeps by like…

This was the first Thanksgiving with my wife’s family, sitting at the stained pine table in the dining room. The wood stove coughed during her mother’s prayer: Amen and the gravy boat bobbing over fresh linen. Her father stared into the mashed potatoes and saw a white battleship floating in the gravy. Still staring at…

Now that the fields belong to the crows and the dark rolls in on a cart with supper, we thicken the skin of the house, tuck a caterpillar of hay, a reverse moat, around the foundation. Half the crickets in Conway died last night under cold rocks—or do they all go at once, once chain…

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…