Poetry

  • FIRST MONTREAL TOUR

    From a series documenting several years (1980–2021) ofmulti-day cycling tours. Slaterville Springs, NY – Ithaca – Syracuse – Seaway Trail – Ogdensburg – Saint-Zotique, QC – Montreal. Home on Amtrak. October 1980; 334 miles. Via Gitane. Pushed up from the south on the Seaway Trail—New York State Route 3—along Lake Ontario, crossing newly built bridges…

  • Disambiguation of Miriam

    Ask her if she is cold. Ask her if she needs to hide. Fold her into a rectangle and slip her into your breast pocket. She will record the auditory data regarding the condition of the heart. Motherdreaming. Mother turning into sleep. Mother changing the channel. Mother turning underwater.   M mostly becomes sunflower head bending…

  • Grace Notes

    ghost: to die ghost: to haunt ghost: to disappear from all messaging ghost: when sunlight bleaches a photograph ghost: another walks out of a room but leaves a perfume ghost: begin with the G guttural, the tongue lifts to hitthe back palate, then the mouth rounds itself around the O’slittle opening, a door ajar, then…

  • BEETHOVEN’S GONE MAD NOW

    Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton Macpherson His late style is called baffling,a slap in the face for a publicardent as a pair of worn-out shoes. But the music is tired of reconciliationand seeks refuge in his rage.Let it grind, let it chafe.As when existence contracts in painround his shrinking liver. Perhaps they’ll do…

  • Seventeen Years I’ve Worked …

    Translated from the Russian by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco Seventeen years I’ve worked nights, circling aroundand guarding rivers, walking over riverbanksin uninhabited spaces heated by my breathbehind the stadium, on lumpy soccer soil,seventeen years in boundless air. It all beganwith resin boiling in some distant, vacant lots,among the shadows in military peacoats,with little rail…

  • Hard Ground

    It’s a spectacle how blood replicates us.When my sister opens her mouth to laugh, she is my father or could be mistaken as so.Away from her familial tongue, the bloodline stretches to her own daughter, familiar bone frames, façade,my mother’s eyes are also in my daughter’s face, my father’s hair growing in my sons’ scalps,…