Poetry

Now each of us isa witness stand: Vasenka eyes us watch four soldiers throw Alfonso Barabinski on the     sidewalk.We let them take him, all of us cowards. What we don’t saywe carry in our suitcases, coat pockets, our nostrils. Across the street they wash him with fire hoses. First he screams,then he stops. A T-shirt falls…

No one knows why deafness came.     But some say the city of Vasenka awoke and refused to hear soldiers.In the name of Petya, a deaf boy killed by soldiers, we refused. Thatday, when soldiers complimented girls in the alley, the girls just slidby, pointing to their ears and shaking their heads. That day, the bakerydoor was…

The day before their wedding, Alfonso and Sonya beat drums in theCentral Square opening the puppet show. When the deaf boy, Petya,sneezes in the first row, one of the puppets, a police sergeant, col-lapses, its wooden ear in the snow. The puppet stands, and shakes hisnose at the audience.     An army jeep swerves around the corner…

I thought I would make a short list of what is not a feeling.Birds are not feelings.Birds eating cherries from the tree are not feelings.This is the best entertainment, I say to myself, watching birds eating cherries,and now I have made a feeling. The robin’s beak glistens with the sticky juice.When a cherry comes off…

How deeply I drink up home catalogs day—they shine open my diorama and teach meto lift my tiny arms to hang the dimeas a mirrory thing upon my shoebox wall. Here’s a sunshine page that reads,“A home expands via the wise use of mirrorswherever you wish for a window.”I’ve read it all, I’ve read, I’ve…

By candlelight the house went down.It’s no wonder the rats won’t come sleepin my newly rented corners…though to me a gatheringof low creatures would be a luminous, a concordant, a thing. Be slow to wish extinct the uglyrodent beasts. You can’t know when all that’s theirswill be more than yours, when a haystack of sleephuddled…

I knew better than to light light after light.I knew—I can’t recall to see candles outand could put the house down in burning—.What if someone asked me, then, do you want to receive its ashes? I’d say yes,that’s the right thing…(but deep down I’d say no,no ashes.). To imagine the size of the boxable to…

I. at thirteen     for a whole dark seasonI was lethal with my pellet gun     murderingsmall things that wandered into yard     stalkingthe thin woods between our house & the highway—I picked off any bird squirrel rabbit snakeI could track     if I had two surprised seconds to explain the meaning of my hands     my instinctswould have been…

Yesterday, jackrabbit belly was not a color. Today I hold a paint strip to the wall, and it’s true: this is the exact shade of a rabbit’s soft fur, of the sepia robe of St. Francis, whose followers swirled like birds, or were birds, St. Francis being one willing to trade like for like. An…