It was torture. A manner of speaking that anyone might fall into after a hard walk in the woods, say, or a day's labor in sunlight, bone-wracking cold. Or concerning that day in the schoolyard years ago when an older boy twisted your arm behind your back until something cracked, and you said what you…
A dog's bark breaks the December ten-degree weather, a bitter dark space bleaching into a voweled ache that staccatos the thin wind, fuzzes into consciousness as a hurt. A cry ballooning in the surface of things, it's like the residue of city air left in the lung, while you search these suspenseful streets— the houses,…
These ruins reach to sea, continue right through surf. This harbor long-disused, once frenetic, is famous for anchors atilt, hooks to snare more of those hulls that loll in sea floor's vast litter. Right over this wreckage sailed those off for Gallipoli, boys of good cheer. Today all's calm and we picnic out on a…
paper stars and moon three tiered houses and their utensils fast heated column of paper money lifted by ghosts the impatient and delighted spark here are two houses crackling to heaven paper rabbit lantern tinseled and sprung into celebration and from the mud bath the ghosts lay paper rice into their mouths fire dribbling down…
for Camilo Pérez-Bustillo The books traveled with Camilo everywhere, like wrinkled duendes whispering advice. The fortune-teller clawed his palm and warned him about El Salvador, where the guards search for books at the border, plucking at pages like the pockets of a bearded subversive. The books were bandits, bootlegging illicit words like Che and insurrection….
Haphazardly a blizzard collects over our window as if the moon, weaving between clouds, were breathing it. In the same window seat, stitched with lilies, each minute prickly, in which she read me forty-five years back her favorite, “Hansel and Gretel,” I am reading to my sister the same tale tonight. She is fifty-eight, I…
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989 No one asks where I am from, I must be from the country of janitors, I have always mopped this floor. Honduras, you are a squatter's camp outside the city of their understanding. No one can speak my name, I host the fiesta of the bathroom, stirring the toilet like a punch…
It is Thursday, raining You ask me a question I try to answer quickly definitively or thought- fully for truly I do not know I go off to think—but nothing answers— so hard so long I lose sight And you who asked are no longer there Or you are—though not as the person who…
The offerings began at dawn and the villagers made no fuss about sharing the rear of the temple yard with them fluttering home like charred paper sucked in by the space, into the mouth of the cave that looks out to the sea, the sandstone walls vibrating under the grip of 100,000 fruit bats. In…
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