Poetry

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,…

i. Rahim Oh my son Let my love cushion the weight of your head. Let me take your hurt      I will hold it while you rest I will fold it into my body. Sleep, my angel, my flower, my brave, sweet boy. [Child with extreme hydrocephalus—deformity of face, body and ear—and defects of…

My first steal: an ice-pop, coaxed from the cornershop freezer and lifted: a brittle, syrupy limb that fused—beneath my shirtsleeve—onto my skin. Second, a tidy slice of apple strudel (cadged behind the café proprietor’s back). Its fudge of apples branded my pocket with a bloom of grease. Years on, the shoes: size eight men’s brogues….