Poetry |
“Post-Mortem”
“I’ve never wanted my own body, never valued it. / To cut is proper, to forget, divine. // Mittens stippled with snow. Runners of a sled. / Tracks of a child’s destiny.”
Poetry |
“In Search of Eden at the New York Botanical Garden” & “Objective Correlative”
“In the leaflet, I read of Kusama’s love of nature. Think of Aristotle declaring art as imitation / of nature, think of artifice. // In the native plant section, my friend Dominic introduces me to the flora and foliage by name. / I follow his eye like a monarch butterfly skimming the goldenrod.”
Poetry |
“Hell’s Half Acre”
“I almost missed the sign which, along with chain / link fencing, was all that set the place apart from the miles / we’d already driven. So much spectacular // sameness begins to numb a person.”
Poetry |
“The Silence”
“All were denounced / as party pariahs & traitors / & the White House attorney // said in public that one / ‘should be shot.'”
Poetry |
“Dido Sotiriou Says Farewell Anatolia, Over and Again”
“Let’s say two million Greeks were never expelled / from Asia Minor. That her protagonist, Axiotis Manolis, // could stay in Turkey and quietly farm / what he was certain would be his small plot // of everlasting life …”
Poetry |
“How I Know We Come From Oceans” & “You Have to Swallow the World”
“But the world is hard, weighted / by concrete, sharp with bayonets / and belfries, in each bite, shards.”
Poetry |
“Crown Shyness”
“We approached some fragile union, / but it could not be sustained. You threatened secrets / I already knew. You missed the house wren’s song / because you kept talking.”
Poetry |
“Outside the Maximum-Security at Dannemora” & “Calendar”
“Women hunch over bags / of candy, soap, gallons of soda / and kids — / all they’ll carry inside. // Wet sneakers slide / through slush, / devoted, slow.”
Poetry |
“Courses”
“The first time I ate rhubarb Mom and I went out to the patch / beside the old hog shed to pick it, twisting and pulling it up / from the root, we sat on the stoop while she cut the stalks away / from the fronds …”
Poetry |
“Live Webcam: Ponte delle Guglie, Venice; March 2020”
“Just two people, now three, and a dog at / the end of a leash. I keep waiting for / something to happen. A bomb. A bullet.”
Poetry |
“Phantom State” & “About the Pen”
“My brother is bent / over a computer 204 miles away. / Rootlessness is not so much a betrayal / as it is a logical extension, my father / shouts. Of what? I ask. I can’t hear his / answer.”
Poetry |
“Provenance,” “Fugue” & “Fin du Monde”
“Theirs, a brief effusion, brief as these words: / experience, memory, perception, exchanged / for chronic interconnectedness, surveillance, / former democratic rule turned demagoguery.”
Poetry |
“The Gulls (The Eagle)”
“There was a choice I had to make and I made it. And sometimes I think the // voice in my head tells me I didn’t make it. That everyone else made the choice, and I floated / instead like a gull over the surface of its water …”
Poetry |
“Remainders”
“When my mother died / twenty-seven years / of appointment books / sat in her closet, / each errand noted / and checked off once done …”
Poetry |
“The Nine Children of Mariana Gluza”
“what does it mean if your family / erases you as a child was the grief of your death / too much to bear or were you replaceable”