Poetry

On the fourth floor, doves.Some circled above usinside the caged patio.We sipped warm tea in clear glasses.Even after the sugar cubes dissolved,I kept stirring.You called the museum misleading:nothing here is actually from the Jurassic period.Not the decaying, antique dice;not the book on the Tower of Babel;not the dogs of the Soviet space program.“What kind of place…

In the village, we kids picked flowersfor the mass grave colorful fragrant weedsblossoming reeds and grasses All the schoolchildrenwere locked in the school that day Huddling around cow dung cakeswe made small fires didn’t entrust to adultsour wild ghost stories Nothing remained of the schoolbut a mossy outline I tried to learn their namesthere were…

after Attila József In a garden of my own makingThe trees and I will soon be waking.Shyly, I’ll while away the hours­Planting seeds and tending flowers. And so I’ll sow and so I’ll reap,Planting, planting in my sleep.So what if all the flowers are weeds?Don’t all of us derive from seeds? I’ll drink my milk,…

When I think of perennials, I do not think of you. I do not think honeybees hovering over petals, nor the sex organs of galaxies of apologies. I think of your mother, rough as an oak’s charm eyes dark & lacquered, two seeds of a riot. She’s not a crone but she crops weeds, threads…

I leave the midnight to find your beginning by way of a village weathering into ruin, by means of men coerced into combat by way of an empire shepherding the work of death. I am here in California and you are there in the Annamites. I seek you by way of retreat, refugees fleeing a…

October’s late vermilion, or the sound a cast stone makes in still water, a starkness to mark the loamy edge of becoming—wants a flash of white flank and mane receding behind the glimmering scrim, shadows moving in—a chill wind spinning in the creaking trees gathering themselves close—needs a stream, a shoot, a faraway spring, musk…

—Bullwinkle When you die you cannot know you’re dead and no one tries to tell you either. A small tree of memories rustles in your head, while a Motown song just wheezes. The last thing you remember is a doctor shrugging off the cure. You feel for the light switch but only find that token…

For a few months, I lived in a place that was cold. When I stood at the front door, in the foreground I saw a lawn covered with snow, in the middle ground a house being built, and in the background mountains that were white and craggy, like clean teeth. The house being built was…

I I learn how to breathe underwater— spring vacation, 1978. Aunt Nayyer takes me to the Caspian  where the stray herrings die by the sable shore.  She raises her arms in prayer for all the bounty  we haul home and feast for dinner.  Each fish the size of my hand. All brine and grit. Carcasses…