Poetry

but I knew there were secrets. We all knew   and we all strong-armed the chesty life vests  back into their shed like lovers   backed into closets.                                            Only at that lake  did I play spies; only there did I try   writing with my sinister hand:   Tin of poison in nightstand.    But it was just…

My student spends his summers in city cemeteries, clipping the scruff that grows too close to the stones   or anywhere the mowers can’t go. Sundays mostly   the death-jilted come, some to pledge the stiff with a fifth, some to Windex the pane of granite. Some of those left come to sob nearer the…

1.           STORY     Shhhh! her mother said. Sit down. Next to me. Time to read.   The girl climbed up on the couch, crossed her ankles. Pay attention.   A yellow picture book. Notice that the word “monkey” sounds   like “Monica.” The title character. George, lived in Africa, a continent   that on…

A violent stirring of the interior unfolding by churns.   What we begin with is disequilibrium. The slurred echoing of the eye.   Call it misrecognition: thinking it’s the earth that’s blurry when it’s the mind.   –   Lost are the coordinates of the spirit, or the animal intuition that binds—   What I…

Forfeit the August you fell into an open manhole. Those years when people stole the metal lids in the middle of the night for scrap metal and grain money. Proceed forward one step. Give up the two hours in 2003 you spent tracing the chiseled characters on your mother’s gravestone. Draining your water bottle to…

Aging, he grew sure the country was gone to hell, not because of me but people too much like me for me to tell the difference. And yet he’d shown me how to mound dark soil, firm and careful, around a cucumber seedling to help it grow. Had let me drive the tractor or pretend,…

—For Feiga Maler, 1919-1942, who died in the Kraków Ghetto     Night after night, what she saw in her sleep: an upside down Havdalah candle like the one she lit to usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath,   praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark…”   The candle…

There’s no heroism to it. Like getting dressed in the morning, it’s just practice: force my head past the collar, squiggle to pull up the zipper behind my back, slither into tights and distinguish blue pumps from black. I pour the cereal in my bowl the same way each morning because that’s how it’s done—…

ashes ~ strong sunlight interacting with green, the leaf an engine trembling in the wind ~ fur and flies ~ the stars behind the clouds ~ gas as a mass ~ the sweat on my back, carrying down my spine the traces of sweat four centuries old that ran into wounds ~ recycled survival ~ the blue-black of the pacific floor and the tentacles pulling life across it ~ the pulsing…