Poetry

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…

1. Fear of Subways Sometimes in the dark I fear trampling, an effortless extinction of the spirit underground: mass transit overflowing onto dangerous edges of piers. It connects palpably to suffocation, a child's version of rape, vapid plots of war movies—but who's the victim? I used to envy the unrapable, not for any power-mad apparatus…

It's Sunday evening. Pomp holds the receipts of all the colored families on the Hill in his wide lap. He shows which white stores cheat these patrons, who can't read a monthly bill. His parlor's full of men holding their hats and women who admire his daughters' hair. Pomp warns them not to vote for…

Into your scorched apron of tumbleweeds,      and I'm home: Mojave, Arid Mother, stop rocking me;      I'm a man now. Don't hum your berceuse of scorpions;      I'm a man. Can't you see?— Yes, I've noticed the cactus,      with its bristly halo, manages on nothing:      no canteen! Like messengers, like magi, the rattlesnakes      sally from their cool…