Poetry

If it is late Sunday in the brain & sunlight falling on the wall of the Food Court and you tell me your daughter at eighteen months still breast-feeds, and if I with my slightly younger daughter sitting at the next table nod but say nothing, nothing, while you speak of the vicissitudes of cracked-nipples…

We are sitting by a blue lake in the middle of the desert, dropping french fries left from lunch into the mouths of giant, waiting carp. You say if this were Poland, a carp that size would be a prize for a fisherman to brag on all his life. To serve, brown and proud as…

Did he save them from the Holocaust to profit his soul, or to make a profit? Did he make them his slaves to protect them from the Holocaust, or to protect his investment? “He represented the German system—a guy who could make money.” He made them slaves. He saved them. He profited. Was there any…

You said she kept leaving you for a dentist, a gay prostitute whose boyfriend has AIDS, and the short-order cook who bruised her. She needed someone pretty in her bed. You’d always wait, stay home until she threw rocks to break your window, begging to be let in. She taught you to want bath water…

Now they lug in eggplant, zucchini peppers, honey, apples, cheese the college jazz band snakes through slide trombone punching October blue snare snipping away the seconds. Above, the golden dome, a manmade sun and atop, “Wisconsin,” a golden woman. Children roll on the Capitol lawn leaves litter their clothes, hair while parents slip loaves and…

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…