Awfully mortal, aren’t they?Their inner lives twist, wad, and shred.Their outer lives are sometimes called shams. I change oily, stained cases, eventually.Even if you’re tiresome, they’ll prop you,Crease your sleeping skin,Press comfort in. I swam in a case, in a sulphur spring,Surrounded by white cows.I carried laundry down the stairs in oneAfter surgery on a…
Translation by Maria Vassileva You could tell right away that I wasn’t a girl— even though the strings lie, as does the neck,awkwardly jutting out of the dress, here and therethe soft taut skin, almost calf, almost silk,or the gentle hairs right there onthe most profitable place in the whole damnplantation. To you I wasthe…
Translation by Maria Vassileva if we take spring and subtract early spring, the slush,the crocuses, the exalted and light infections of the nasopharynx,the lamb, all skin and bones—Rossetti and Blake are yet to comb the celestial wool,then Lent, budding green, then the greatdesert of April,from the first day to the last,then the rush of blood,…
It’s all over. But the smoldering hatredtried to jump out a window,full of indecision and cognac. And bikiniseveryone will want to go to bed with. Youtried to jump out a windowbecause you have a penis. So do I.Everyone will want to go to bed with you.You may as well put your pants onbecause you have…
We went to see The Book of Mormon (the musical).I was working on my own musical, The Book of Mermen“Merman? As in Ethel Merman?” No, I said, The Bookof Mermen, those quizzical mythical beasts halffish half man. Though I could see where Ethel Mermanwould make sense as a musical—an excruciating musicalcovering the later years, the…
Spring rolls in hard—swift, brash, heedless.Box elder saplings, blackberry and burdockbreak ground any place we leave alone. A dozen dark purple tulips sprang upby the front steps. Did we plant them?Another gesture I can’t remember— what I conceived, things I once saidwith such conviction. How I got from thereto here. I am not the person…
The rear view camerais why they hate us. ActivePark Assist, so you can havea car, not learn to parallelpark. Also Las Vegas, the decadentwest. All You Can Eat is whythey hate us, our fat ass fallingoff the edges of our chair.Our sturdy-ass chairs is whythey hate us, chairs that we sit into eat all we…
after Ozu (1936) It’s 1924 in rural Japan.A widow who’s spent her life workingin a silk factory finally decides to sacrifice everythingfor the sake of her only son’sone wish: to study in Tokyo. “Be a great man,” she tells him.He’s all she has. Twelve years later, she travelsto the capital. She hasn’t seen himsince the…
unfolds over the piano played by my son’s teacher as he watches at her side. Builds slowly, with stories of farmland, splintered barns, pumpkin patches rolling toward bay, toward ocean. Of yellow mustard fields, of fishing nets, of rivers gone dry. Of cemeteries where my mother and I must linger nearby, blistering beyond the fence. Of marble halls on the fifth floor,…
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