Poetry

The high-silled window with no shade or sash. Let's start with that, with nothing but big square panes of clean glass, the clear glare of law and the weather, rain mixed with clouds, and wind. And beneath them on the landing, three girls, three teenaged girls, teaching themselves to smoke and to flick ash. And,…

Coming into the home stretch—but what’s home? A couple of years before he died, Ray got stung by a bee and his heart nearly stopped. Previous stings hadn’t bothered him. Now he became allergic to gluten, milk, fruit. He broke out at a look, had problems breathing. Women get menopause. Men pause, then fall. Another…

I have to sympathize with the child. The mother has changed clothes twice, nothing seems right tonight, nothing fits, not even the moon between those two trees, it's simply too big, too fat, too angry to stay put. The other woman has skinny legs and a face like rain. So I have to sympathize with…

I blow on the fire to help it find its wood. The corners of the room are askew. The files have knuckles hard as teak. They bang out sentences on the insides of lampshades, as if it were a party game. A skull sits on its occiput by the window, looking up among glass fused…

Off Havana the ocean is green this morning of my birth. The conchers clean their knives on leather straps and watch the sky while three couples who have been dancing on the deck of a ship in the harbor, the old harbor of the fifties, kiss each other's cheeks and call it a night. On…

The story is told of Ryokan, a teacher who lived in a small hut, that one day while walking along a potato field, he was overtaken by the desire to shit. Now the owner, who was suffering a series of thefts, had hidden nearby. When he saw Ryokan all bent over he leapt up and…

And a feature about the only son of the famous “Angel of Death,” the man who experimented at Auschwitz on all those dwarfs and twins. I fold the section once in half and then in half again, as if to narrow focus, but glimpse instead a lizard as it shoots up the steps outside then…

Sit, he orders.      She sits But Heaven knows he was only talking      to the dog. Folding down bedclothes, he discovers      his socks she made into them. He's already rewashed dinner dishes      while she was in the shower. Still, in bed she alone teaches him      how to cross his eyes. Holding his penis like a microphone,…

The Heart wants what it wants— or else it does not care— —Emily Dickinson So still. Not a cricket. In this heat the trees around the house hold motionless even at midnight. I trundle the electric fan, little pool of wind, along with me from room to room, and imagine Emily Dickinson carrying a candle…