Poetry

1.           STORY Shhhh! her mother said. Sit down.Next to me. Time to read. The girl climbed up on the couch,crossed her ankles. Pay attention. A yellow picture book. Notice that the word “monkey” sounds like “Monica.” The title character.George, lived in Africa, a continent that on her globe was colored red.The leaves on the skinny…

A violent stirring of the interiorunfolding by churns. What we begin with is disequilibrium.The slurred echoing of the eye. Call it misrecognition:thinking it’s the earth that’s blurrywhen it’s the mind. – Lost are the coordinatesof the spirit, or the animalintuition that binds— What I mistook for a border was but a moving pointwhich makes me limitless,somehow…

Aging, he grew sure the country was gone to hell,not because of me but people too much like mefor me to tell the difference. And yethe’d shown me how to mound dark soil,firm and careful, around a cucumber seedlingto help it grow. Had let me drive the tractoror pretend, sitting on his lap as he…

—For Feiga Maler, 1919-1942, who died in the Kraków Ghetto Night after night, what she saw in her sleep:an upside down Havdalah candle like the one she litto usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath, praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark…” The candle in her dreams, like her real…

There’s no heroism to it.Like getting dressed in the morning,it’s just practice: force my head past the collar,squiggle to pull up the zipperbehind my back, slither into tightsand distinguish blue pumps from black.I pour the cereal in my bowl the same wayeach morning because that’s how it’s done—life, the whole scribbled mess of it.There’s no…

ashes ~ strong sunlight interacting with green, the leaf an enginetrembling in the wind ~ fur and flies ~ the stars behind the clouds ~ gasas a mass ~ the sweat on my back, carrying down my spine the tracesof sweat four centuries old that ran into wounds ~ recycled survival ~the blue-black of the pacific floor and the tentacles pulling life across it~ the pulsing limitations of a…

At Christmastime we stay only one night,and it’s a dump—burn holes in brown carpet,no air. We keep the window open tothe swamp, listen to raccoons and musk ratspitch in the marsh as they give last fight tothe gators devouring. The next threedays we drive in separate cars three hourseach way to get to the specialist,…

I. Is the Constitution the threadthat holds the country freetogether, or not? For years, both saidno; now one picks up the threadand—apostate—changes his mind.Is it a proslavery, an antislaverydocument, or is it a threadthat cannot hold two men together, nor set them free? II. Whose pride undid the thread?Brothers, who was remiss?Method, alliance, creed—or some…