Poetry

For days the last day has burned the palm like a rough rope and each child vibrates with escape, dreaming past the swing and collide of bees in heavy sunlight. The mountain ash drags its silver knuckles against the window pane. The nuns glisten and continue. In Polish accents they say what heaven says, this…

The leaves all blaze, a fireplace's commonplace crimson and gold, the vines become scrawls of a letter hidden from someone — parents, your spouse, or other lover — between newpapers in the kindling bin or only accidentally fallen into flames, and, worse, your only memory of the address is vines black upon leaves blackening after…

Gambelli's waitresses sometimes got down on their knees, searching for coins dropped into the carpet— hair coiled stiff, lips coated in that hennaed shade of red, the banner-color for lives spent in the wake of husbands dying without pensions, their bodies used in ceaseless marching toward the kitchen's dim mouth, firm legs migrating slowly ankleward….

I would never say anything against the dead. I would drop my clothes to them and say yes, see how the sun won't leave alone what we cover. My neighborhood is startlingly luminous. Yesterday yellow tanks steamshovelled for the underworld. Otters dove to sleek back their hair. On the bench a man old as dirt…

It wasn’t easy, inventing the wheel, dragging the first stones into place, convincing them to be the first house. Maybe that’s why our fathers, when they finished work had so little to say. Instead, they drifted — feet crossed on the divan, hands folded over stomachs like a prayer to middle age. They watched the…

So today, yet another Guyanan will try to run the border dressed in a dead housewife's hair—all they've recovered since her disappearance from a downtown shopping mall. An “incident,” the paper says. One of those “routine occurrences”— wrestling my trust ever further from the publicans assigned to keeping us safe, whole. Rather: vow to stay…

San Zaccaria, Venice All day long, the madonna runs by the river in her red and blue gown. The wet earth steams, and cabbage fields bear the lace of her footprints. Maria, her mother calls over and over across the fields. But in the end, after many tries, Bellini can't do it. He loves too…

The purple iris holding its throat open, a music too faint to be heard enters the waiting room, the singing clear, but only to the inner ear. We have come for a glimpse of the unborn, in white robes ghosting through the exam room. On the screen a hand, a blur of bone, the skull…

Those armored domes would appear at random, the gifts of chance. Like us hearing the sinister rustle of leaves during a stalled moment of those games we played in the woodlot. My little brother and I would bring the box turtle home, where we'd built a cage out of old window screens. At first it'd…