Poetry

  • Museum of Tested Faith

    It’s a private collection. My love and I pay more than we can affordto walk through this apartment-turned-exhibit. Our guide leads                   us into the first room, which is full of the sort of dark                  that makes you feel gone, that pulls your color out through your heels. According to our guide, this room contains elevenof the…

  • I Am Different

    I do not fear being alone anymore, any more than I fear the “I” in apoem. “I” still do not understand myself completely, and if viewed fromthe corner of the eye, that’s thrilling. “I” am in a lifelong mystery withinmy own ownership. Yet no one, not even “I” will witness its unfoldingentirely. I’ve heard that…

  • Free will

    is in our hands: in these bones lashedby ligaments, sheathed in skin. Flex your fingers wide, like folding fans,collapse them in. Muscleless puppets, they are merciless or tender dependingon what moves them. We can train a single finger to hold a body’s weight; all tentogether, to summon a sonata, birth a baby, ball into clubs…

  • I, Too, Write Pandemic Poems

    In 2020, I, too, walk through life with hand sanitizer,spraying it on everything. Under the horrified microscope,life blows kisses, sticks out its tongue.The neighbors’ kids stick their noses to the fence.So does mine. Don’t lick the fence, Nathan. Lizzie. Josh.I, too, am desperate for a tenuous separationof destiny from statistics. Before the pandemic,why did we…

  • Of Gardens

    With Dickinson, Woolf & Duras I am alive—becauseI am not in a Room— Emily’s fingertips feltthe Morning Glory & Virginiastood straight between four walls worrying about the daffodils & the fig trees.A dying fly bouncing on the windowpane,buzzing, struggling—Marguerite wrote— unknown sky                     it’s overIs a wild garden safer than an owned house? When you make…

  • Two Poems

    Translated by Kaveh Akbar and Arman Salem صبهكه خانه را ترک مى كنم، جوانم،و شبپير به خانه باز مى گردمبا اندوهاى هزار ساله،چهار ديوارى خانه امآرام و صبورپذيراى پيرمردى است كهسحرگاهان.جوان برمى خيزد In morningWhen I leave my house, I am young And nightI return again to my house, oldHolding one thousand years of grief…

  • The foot

    I lay down next to my child as she sleeps.Three years ago, she was a ceramicistmolding the elasticity of my skin—(A foot! A trail inside the sand of me.) Now, she is more than half the length of my bodyas I lay next to her—She rolls over toward me, heavy with sleep— The only feeling better than…

  • Coda

    To the Memory of Lee “Scratch” Perry20 March 1936 – 29 August 2021 Source of echomadman of propheciesbuffering nonsensein absence of anythingsolid as cloudflungfrom the wombpale pallid asteroidbelt of nanny goat conjuror of the ill-spokenad-libbing in shadowa race in a curveas an old woman’s palmbillows the blue lightinstance of an ant’slegs twitch beneaththe headless Nobodytrickster…