Poetry

She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor,   an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it   might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great…

Sprawled on the back of a flatbed truck we cradled hoes, our minds parceling rows of cotton to be chopped by noon. Dawn stuck in the air. Blackbirds rang the willows.   Ahead, a horse trailer stretched across the road. Braced by youth and lengths of summer breeze we didn’t give a damn. We’d be…

“Si la uva está hecha de vino, quizá nosotros somos las palabras que cuentan lo que somos.” —Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos for Jane Miller It’s the mind that marshals everything into neat sequence in retrospect—subject, verb, predicate—fooling us into believing words don’t dig their tangled roots in us. But rooting around we…

“Flour is a fine thing.” —Nadezhda Mandel’shtam Bread we’ve all pissed away Stale crumbs the baby dances On sandwich she won’t eat now Vallejo’s nightmares semi Full colon hungers crackling Like electricity be dash Tween them a hungrier man If we survive moments self dash Abnegation like that We will elect ourselves to The pantheon…

Just after I had landed my first job— they needed busboys at the Mexican chain restaurant that opened where Lake crossed Route 17, an intersection known in town for being dangerous—we met. Among my new responsibilities was polishing the silverware, he said while pointing a dull butter knife at me. He plunged it in a…

1. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and so on to the ultimate loss—a battle, a world. In other words, the breeze from this butterfly’s golden wings could fan a tsunami in Indonesia or send a small chill…

A wolf whose eyes glow red and jaws close quick meets the voluptuous Miz Nude Bo-Peep beside a shepherd with a crooked stick: and, ever after, they enthrall lost sheep. The wolf prowls round the shed. Straw, timber, brick— he’ll blow through walls, smash every windowpane. But wait—he’ll cut the sheep a deal. It’s trick…

Some cruel entrepreneur glued jewels onto wings to prevent their broad, papery flowering, the ruby or sapphire or smoky opal hump wedged in an oval frame, its frail gold chain blunted with a pin, so the exotic beetle, living brooch, could plod its strict loop. Pinned to my mother’s monogrammed blouse, that insect circled her…

1. Eisenach, birthplace (in 1685) of J. S. Bach. Close-by, on a high hill, Schloss Wartburg, the Thuringian landgraves’ ancestral stronghold. Which also sheltered music, judging from Elisabeth’s aria in Act II of Tannhäuser, a paean addressed to the castle’s Great Hall as she waits for the Minnesänger to file in and join her. Music…