Poetry

Can you believe I have cancer? Yosra asks, holding a mug of tea between her hands, her hair close to her scalp, almost laughing. I try to imagine the cancer auditioning inside her body, tiny translucent slivers of light weaving in and out and of her abdomen and uterus, traveling up and through her throat,…

Sometimes it’s tucked into itself, sewn up like the lips of a prisoner. After the procedure, the girls learn how to walk again, mermaids with new legs, soft knees buckling under their new sinless bodies. Daughter is synonymous with traitor, the father says. If your mother survived it, you can. Cut, cut, cut. One girl…

There’s at least another being being you you may / may not have met. You know the theft and that free pass driving the already raging raging mad, scary as scarefest movies like by Stephen King when tombs thrust up from roiling mud in storms obligatory to the Big Reveal. But. No one sees them…

for Grace This is the shed against which you leant at the end of the field, the edge of the world— this, the darkness only half meant in which you feared that fear lay curled This is the crazy, rickety door of the shed, blue as the summer sky but rough as the autumn sea…

When you collapsed the first time at the dinner table, you fell not like a hero in Homer, not like a great tree with a concussive thump that raises a dust cloud that blinds the battling soldiers inside it so they can’t tell enemies from friends— but imploding like a tall building shaken at its…

Poetry Workshop Princeton, 1980 We had water fights at home, she said of the subject of home when it stuck its big head awkwardly into the room and sat down. We others at the table gazed at it, at her— this mousy senior who looked thirteen with her pale frail body, bumps for breasts, and…

The worst thing that could happen did. She had a little girl who died. They took his parents while he hid. Your wife committed suicide. The guards raped him with a broom. He was beaten and left for dead. She woke to someone in the room. Then he was on her in the bed. The…

Author’s Note: The speaker of the poems in The Golden Abacus is a lynched man. As his body decays, animals, the wind, carry the body to different parts of the world. What isn’t carried away seeps into the earth and travels back in time as it mixes with the earth and stone. He, the body,…

      Great Crested Grebes It is spring—let us call it spring— where February tips the wings of March with whitened skies; here, where this dance of birds is the slowest, kindest measure, the arc and rainbow of their mirroring a graceful shimmer and a bright display. The water and reflection ask no question of themselves. Headshake,…