Poetry

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…

Midsummer's Eve: rain slants into docked barges near the Jardin des Plantes Cut your losses. Soon the inhabitants will leave the city to the international monoglot young. Out of the smallest, oldest perched village branch well-marked paths, beside the stream, the ravine. The streams flow down into the local river. The footpaths widen into roads…

She, a beautician, came to see her friend Inside the morgue, when she had had her cry. She found the body dumped there all awry, Not as she thought right for a person’s end, Left sideways like that on one arm and thigh. In their familiarity with the dead It was as if the men…

4. Two things we won't talk about: Money, and death, not necessarily in that order She's perched somewhere invisibly Like a contestant waiting in the wings. Did you say wings? Wings? she breathes. Look, I'm not some fancy prize Or afterlife, not some ethereal doll Squashed in a box. That one you had Died in…