Poetry

Old news: leaf parchment crackles underfoot. Pine needles, acorns, lichen. The waterfall only a patter sliming the cliff. The slope rumples down through mountain laurel and pitches below to ramparts of slate, shattered quarries, a moss-streaked bluff. We tread on silver flakes and shadows. Downward, ever downward, to the meadow where the ghost lily, late…

Green tips of tulips are rising out of the earth— you don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans in an arroyo but catch the budding tips of pear branches and wonder what it’s like to live along a purling edge of spring. Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon skeleton on the White…

The last of a late night’s argument, the dreadful unsnarling of intent— our what you said and what I meant, and neither of us penitent. After the hours and anger spent, what I continue to resent there in the bed, the dark apartment taking its turn as the respondent— babbling pipes, sighing vent— is how,…

A man with CRCK on his snapback. A man in a BLDBTH hoodie [what happened to the affable vowels?]. I stay shy of the men on the bus because we know who we are. We are propelled by kimchi and cologne that smells of diesel fuel and demon. Five hours of trance and hard consonants….

Make a drawing of it, I was told My world of simple sun, bare land She was raised in that kennel on the hill An old trailer, I draw it vertical, tipped up on its rear end There’s plenty light but little shade I add some frenchified shadow around the trailer A loud squeak, ka-pow!…

Like black birds pushing against glass, I didn’t hold myself back. I gave in completely and went all the way to the vague influence of the distant stars. I saw something like an angel spread across the horizon like some dreadful prophecy refusing to be contained, to accept limits. She said, “Are you sure you…

Breezing easily between exotic Chinoiserie and hometown hoedown, whisking lightly between woodwind delicacy and jazzy trombone, he must have the widest and oddest repertoire of gestures, which allows him a stylistic and dynamic range unusual even among today’s most highly regarded conductors. The way he slipped from the grandiose opening Adagio maestoso to the suddenly…

My armpits smell like Campbell’s soup and my hair feels like the welcome mat beneath the sign to wipe your feet between the showroom and the shop. Who’s the new guy sweeping up? Six bucks an hour, off the books. Outside the showroom and the shop, he sleeps in cabs of junkyard trucks, eats at…

So you think I couldn’t have been the life of your miserable party. You think because I graded 9th-grade quizzes into the night I was probably fit for just that. You think I didn’t finish my novel because I feared it might not sell. You assume because my immigrant parents refused to teach me their…