Poetry

Houston, 1953 Masses of one un-housed household added to another, all abandoned and made to abandon their names. A non-colonnade of gray clods. A un-quadrangle of neo-rational obliteration. An arcade of ashes. Ditch-buried hordes of kin left akimbo, an imprisoned necropolis on the verge of the vast acres of the settled precincts of our planet—or…

The walls inside the city buildings curve, glass and plaster bending in thigh-shape, or breast-shape, a comfort to patients in RECEPTION, waiting to have their griefs or gallbladders removed, tumors and proud flesh pulled from the body, snipped off by the healer who has no sodden breast to offer in return, no nutriment, but only…

It’s just like the tongue, isn’t it, to fold you up into a tiny origami swan whose angled wings splay and whose jutted neck and beak point out over some expanse of water a tugboat hauling the mammoth frigate upstream the reckless kayaker tickling an eddy the currents changing temperature beneath your feet as you…

Sidewalk vendors look askance when I ask Am I headed East or West? I could tell them I navigate by the sky’s color but it wrong-foots me time and again. What sky? they say, looking up. The one that cracked wide one bright September, while we were looking away, the one that enchanted Portuguese cartographers,…

Translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer Verily it is the Apple that wants to be eaten Apple of sweet ignorance of good and evil a dappled, appley, appleton squeezed inside itself like a fist reeling until hurt by its own seeds Around its own impatience it quickly revolves to eve so that she might…

She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country? I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since that’s all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes are what model minorities like me know nothing about, right? Doesn’t a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn’t a mango a…

loved the Mobius, and the sky’s big suggestion                of a universe, and now and then would imagine a heaven as if it were his to construct and manage, death just a pause                before the real work would begin. In truth, and in his…

Is it difficult to get away from it all once you’ve had a child?   I am swaying in the galley—working                to appease this infant who is not fussing but will be fussing if I don’t move—                when a black steward enters the…