Poetry

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…

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….

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 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…

Peter died in a paper tiara cut from a book of princess paper dolls; he loved royalty, sashes and jewels. I don't know, he said, when he woke in the hospice, I was watching the Bette Davis film festival on Channel 57 and then— At the wake, the tension broke when someone guessed the casket…

I am small and don't want much at all. I live in a striped quilt And curl up near the door. Grandpa tripped On me and broke his jaw. I drop My doll's head in the cake. I always wear pink. I smile in school and dunk My own curls in the ink. I share…

War chariots thunder, horses neigh, the barbarians are coming. What are we waiting for, young nubile women pointing at the wall,      the barbarians are coming. They have heard about a weakened link in the wall.      So, the barbarians have ears among us. So deceive yourself with illusions: you are only one woman,      holding one broken…