Poetry

  • ghost marriage

    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…

  • The King of Books

    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….

  • In My Best Recurrent Dream

    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…

  • Black Stones I, II, III

    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…

  • Goa Lawah, Bali

    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…

  • Matthew’s Passion

    Easter Sunday. Matthäus Passion spins. (Have been revising “A Valediction,” avoiding writing this.) Can't seem to get past the first disc's aria, Buß und Reu. Yesterday we dyed eggs (it was my first time). We all laughed while I reddened, blowing; out oozed the mess. Then you were too drained for St. Mary's smoky Mass….

  • Scenes From a Romance

    The chair breathes for hours. Off in another country, a waiter yells at me—You can't save anyone you can only save food. Plastic bags for dogs. Here's my friend at last back from the bathroom. He breathes like a chair. Save me, for I am green fruit, it is raining, and I shall fall too…

  • The Floral Apron

    The woman wore a floral apron around her neck, that woman from my mother's village with a sharp cleaver in her hand. She said, “What shall we cook tonight? Perhaps these six tiny squids lined up so perfectly on the block?” She wiped her hand on her apron, pierced the blade into the first. There…