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 thinkhoneybees hovering over petals, nor the sex organs of galaxiesof apologies. I think of your mother, rough as an oak’s charmeyes dark & lacquered, two seeds of a riot. She’s not a cronebut she crops weeds, threads her fingers through goldenrod.She…

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

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 flashof white flank and mane recedingbehind the glimmering scrim, shadows moving in—a chill wind spinningin the creaking treesgathering themselves close—needs a stream, a shoot, a faraway spring, muskof dead and dying leaves—foxfire, brackish…

—Bullwinkle When you dieyou cannot know you’re dead    and no onetries to tell you either. A small treeof memories rustles in your head, whilea Motown song just wheezes. The last thing you rememberis a doctor shrugging off the cure. You feel for the light switchbut only find that token doorless door. The quiet grows like…

For a few months, I lived in a place that was cold. When I stood at thefront door, in the foreground I saw a lawn covered with snow, in themiddle ground a house being built, and in the background mountainsthat were white and craggy, like clean teeth. The house being built wasa box of raw…

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 stack over our palms,their dorsal fins…