Poetry

Everything’s a window the professor told my class, and I thought about breaking that glass, or shutting the curtains, or better yet opening those windows and climbing out into the snowy world beyond. He said fashioning windows is the only way we can make sense of what we see, so even as I walked off…

My mother started writing essays in English, essays with wrong punctuation, wrong tenses, wrong spacing wrong spelling, with Arabic terms too, typed in English (and a French accent) when she cannot find the translation for…mina. In her e-mail she tells me she’s very “exited” about this— her American teacher loves her ideas, even in her…

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.         —Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense” I’m here, listening to the sound of oars dipping and dripping while they pull across the…

I am successfully cupping fireflies with my make believe hand. I am admiring the invisible irises I forgot to plant last November. I actually see the tie-dye evolution of autumn leaves for the first time My son said after we left the hospice where my mother would be A ghost before we ever saw her…

Contrails crisscrossing overhead, spreading puff by fading puff into each instant of the past… dull notes, antiphonal clouds lined out against the blue, arpeggios down that road as far as we can hope to go…                                        …

She was the stain in the teacup    that spread up toward the handle. She was the handle that snapped    off the hairbrush, and She was the hairbrush he tossed    onto the fire, and She was the fire he carried    each day in his pipe. She was the pipe the bath water    rode to the river,…

That it was fine linen flawlessly stitched,             as silken as new skin. That it was the color of ivory or an old book’s pages             left blank in the front. In the beginning shape of the letter A, it made             a long A sound. With lace. Because she was heard to say it…

The dome, the mustache like a circus strongman’s, those shoulders people still climb on. and eyes that hold you in the snow before stacked and battered volumes of mutually exclusive systems of belief: UFOs, black magic, Madame Blavatsky’s wisdom received at the feet of lamas, while yours grow cold in the slushy street. His look…