Poetry

Snipped at the neck— tangerine roe, milky innards, their mouths jerked open for a final sentence. One bowl of guts and eyes, one of their stiff, edible bodies. The baby inside me bolts. “Off with their heads, off with their heads.” My three-year-old marches the kitchen keen for dinner. She pauses only for a vase…

1. Lately in her full arms I had felt the things That would not go, the hands: She had gathered to herself Some part of all of the fingers Of all of the men who had Touched her there, Florencio, His broad fingers like past winter gloves, Caetano who was matches, Cesar, who could only…

In the middle of the line under my reading eye a spot of fot. It makes faint an e, then a y, and travels to the right. In the next line the spot expands, shifts and erases a whole word. I close my eyes and see a tiny bright buzz saw that flickers. Opened, my…

For the fountain of water flows ever with the water of the spirit, having the one and only Fish, taken with the hook of divinity, which feeds the whole world, as if dwelling in the sea, with its own flesh. —Narratio rerum quae in Perside acciderunt The first wild flowers on Suicide Hill were birdfoot…

Teodoro Luna met a woman for whom he cared instantly, She loved him back, And together two weeks later they stepped into a marriage Eighty-three miles long. It was his little joke, this calling of the years miles, And she would feign anger At this man who through the years had earned the right To…

It was when neon was no longer available That they went mad. There was nothing to cut the Formica. Offbeat shouting dirty words Dropping glitter on backward lands Nothing seemed to help. It was quarter to 2 in a small, dull town Jukebox exhausted, coffee burned stale A go-go girl sluffs on her bedroom slippers…

Mauve into purple, bent on foam-green stems, a bank of lavender washed by the rain recalls Languedoc, though this is on the plain of Caen, between two blocks of HLMs. Down south, the hedge around the one lycée is rosemary, high as a young girl's eyes. Here, notebooks bloat in puddles on the grass: school's…

A topaz stare, the art of self-seduction. . . She looks without resentment at the face The mirror offers her, applying blush To fill the contours with a candy red. His dancing tremors through the cabinet, Shaking her gaze with patience. “Do me next!” He tells her in a voice less rude than brash: She…

What the Earth Knows 1922, a summer noon when I was twelve, I stood above a pasture watching red ants crawl up from beneath the ground nearby, each one carrying a bead, a colored bead, so that the line of ants became a necklace moving past my feet. I knelt and dug then, knelt and…