Poetry

At Christmastime we stay only one night, and it’s a dump—burn holes in brown carpet, no air. We keep the window open to the swamp, listen to raccoons and musk rats pitch in the marsh as they give last fight to the gators devouring. The next three days we drive in separate cars three hours…

I.   Is the Constitution the thread that holds the country free together, or not? For years, both said no; now one picks up the thread and—apostate—changes his mind. Is it a proslavery, an antislavery document, or is it a thread that cannot hold two men together, nor set them free?   II.   Whose…

The Sentencing of John Punch to Perpetual Slavery, Virginia, 1640   To take a fistful of tobacco— after mixing the gnat-size seeds   with sand, after scattering, after thinning the seedlings,   after hoeing the knee-high hills, after picking cutworm larvae   or tobacco flea beetles from the dusty leaves,   after priming and topping,…

translated by Jhumpa Lahiri I found a notebook filled with poems, written in Italian, in my desk in Rome. I am trying to understand who wrote them. It may be a woman named “Nerina,” which is the only thing written on the cover of the notebook.   I’d like to know for certain who ate…

When I press my fingertips together and make a tangerine-size space that the light comes through   I see God there a little bit—a glowy something   I try to press deeper in past the flesh and bone   my breath pulls into it to hold it there deeper stiller and I worry about dying…

No one’s gonna say it, but your baby’s ugly. It’s not your fault. All babies look like aliens. This is another thing I said a little drunk that I meant with my whole heart and every time my mouth opens the thing I mean comes out, but it comes out wrong. The ice caps are…

What were you listening to, Great-Gramma, down at the lake, that Saturday nite when you felt you couldn’t breathe? Not those lo riders waxed and raring, the way souped-up carburetors suck oxygen to drag along the strip, your gulping breaths, gurgling, ineffective. The ambulance fetched you. In the hospital, they lopped off your thick braids…

In this story the cockroach is the man, the curtain my girlhood, the creamed corn spilled by the mother wasted familial love, the father’s zealotry a metaphor for emotional blindness.   In this story the radioactive dinosaur is the man, the city of Tokyo my body and the metro tunnel, well, you know. Fire is…

floating at the surface of the oil the fish is weightless and ready to come undone between your teeth. I got to call Dan Henry, he gone want this   while it’s hot. Mo rises to find her phone as if gravity has no authority over her body, lifts the antennae to summon this husband…