Poetry

There was this cock in high school, not that I had anything to do with it but we girls talked a lot, giggled, how it had a job to do and was often seen rising behind its spandex suit at the country club. It worked pretty good, we figured, but there was this one girl…

Sacred day of rain, the crowds on Karol’s Bridge thin out, slightly repentant of their tourist ways, hunker down in pensions and hotels, to ponder the weird twists of language to be found in their brochures, or complain of the thinness of the towels, or of the pickpockets who speak the quick language of the…

Recent downpour, the black streets glisten, the red and white bus dips down like a sail into the runoff pooled near the tram tracks. Fifteen stories above, I drink beer, floating in my own sea—the smell of mushrooms frying in the kitchen—while the dark spike of the Palace of Culture fades into the blackness of…

I’ve seen them all over the city. After midnight near the consulate, closer to the streetlight than you might expect: a parked car, windows misted, wings for a trademark. And the muffled urgencies from the back seat—someone about to die, perhaps, or be delivered—the sleek silhouette of a woman’s legs lifted and spread behind the…

No coat, bad shoes, caught sudden In a spring downpour, a girl scrambles Into a small market on her way Home from school. The old man is alone, Picking bruised apples from a bin, tossing them Softly, one at a time into a slop can. Usually, he chases kids out, having caught them lifting Chocolate…

Catherina Schrader, midwife, nearly an apparition in mists rising from the Wadden Zee, follows a stranger to his boggy farm. The man is afraid of his wife, her cries, her twisted face. Who knows what may enter a woman and flourish there? There have been stories—monsters with fingers and toes grown together like pigs’ feet…

Angry at my persistent rejection of what he said Was his love, a skinny neighborhood boy Once held his mother’s kitchen knife To my twelve-year-old throat. This comes to mind Today as I walk past a couple of tough teenage boys Near the local high school, dressed in the same Oversized black shirts and backwards-turned…

The mother kneels beside her grieving child, grieving because the whale has not come, because the whales are elsewhere, not heaving clear of the water where child and mother can see them. In the brilliant light of a day at sea, the child whimpers. Her own small sea ebbs and rolls until she spews an…