Poetry

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…

It was not my first death. I had coiled the rare wood and fabric of stiff kittens into a shoe box, toyed with the blood-dried stumps of squirrel tails after the hunt. I knew vertigo, large hands lowering me into a casket to kiss a grandparent's waxy cheek, the hot wind of palm leaf funeral…

From a distance they looked like Oreos scattered over the snowy pastures. But that was from a distance. Up close they looked like cows, Holsteins, enormous and stupid and occasionally mooing in their sleep. Or turning their long faces—all nose— they look at you with their sad childlike eyes, they lift their tails— their great…

When her granddaughter, who is the pilot, shouts “Clear!” through the cockpit's open window and the prop begins like the earth to make circles we can't see so we must go on faith the sun will rise again, my mother says from the back seat of the C-182, “You'll have to close that window. I'm…

We were numb to Nebraska, stunned by a land so austere we feared the Sioux would not survive the monotone of country road. Though in love, we did not include in our romance the constancy of cornfields, the slackened flags above each roadside stand. We lived inside a grand idea: we could change The State….

Two girls sit on the railing by the train station. Late spring or early fall, warm enough to melt popsicles. They watch the small figures revolve through the door, the light off the glass, the rushed steps, the drape and color of clothing . . . When enough money is deposited they'll rob the bank….