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…
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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