Poetry

The Rabbi saw a Torah-scroll surrounded by a fence with one picket missing. . .The iron points glowed, and the gap was like a missing tooth in the face of God. So Talmud was written. I let the book slide to the floor, and shred puckers on the pink chenille bedspread. This is my new…

It was Menasha, the name in the middle — not Murray — which my Grandmother thought more “American” — in reality Irish, like the ones who left their homes to them. Menasha or Manasseh, the half tribe, brother to Ephraim, son of Joseph- Israel-Jacob's son who blessed not him the elder, but Ephraim, his younger…

In the pink light of the funeral parlor they spread her out, the arc of a lamp overseeing the calm colors of her folded hands. How far away from us she lies in the big, serious casket like a creche, holding as it does her babied corpse. Visitors in clumps of twos and threes sway…

To be a boy meant it was only easier to pee in the woods or from a rowboat easier to fit into tight jeans the crooks of trees except for some fat boys and some flat-bellied flat-buttocked girls. To be a boy meant it was always harder to have a beautiful anything: like eyes, handwriting,…

Cumana in August is not so bad. True, it's winter and the days get shorter. But not because the sun does. Because the rain comes earlier and earlier until one is almost back in his home by noon. The mountains are worse. Invierno: winter wet, summer hot. The rivers swell, creciente; from upriver down, dark…

All day I've been thinking of the grief on each of their faces, Adam and Eve. The feeling is closest to a wave as it peaks, how it seems on the verge of self-consciousness before it collapses. Their mouths hold a single sound that divides, familiar as rain. The angel points away from the green…

Cloves were four-eighty-nine a jar in the supermarket two years ago. And I felt my heart race at the cost and bought them, an investment, their value rising higher than silver earrings, handmade at the silver shop for six dollars that same year. The cloves were perfume in the silver spicebox shaped like a castle,…

—for Bill Aron Iris to iris, all these clicks should parcel out a single ribbon of behavior into chapters of a person. Trying not to try, I try a grin which over-ages into grimace, just as the shutter steps aside. O look, a butterfly, a butterfly! Oh no, too late. Someone, please help me not…

He played a paralyzed man once, before I knew him. He made his own body settle into a position of broken readiness, hunched on the rotting pins of his bones. I thought I'd seen it before: actors in wheelchairs as actors in wheelchairs. But he gave that damage power, a sound in the throat that…