Poetry |
“What I Like,” “Elegy” & “The Second Year”
“An elegy reveals the current / state of the grief. Therefore, // I cannot write an elegy. / Grief is a shape-shifter.”
Literature in Translation |
“I Didn’t Want to Be Born Here (or There),” “Decompression” & “untitled”
“I’m made up wholly of inertia / from which I suck the strength // of the stump / of a phantom / tree”
Poetry |
“The Pitfalls of Enlightenment,” “Imagining His Final Hours or Just Like a Dream, You’re Here With Me” & “Go On”
“It is a rite of passage / to learn the game, to take your seat / and study your partner across // the folding table. Inheritance / of how to lose, how to sneak a win.”
Poetry |
“Sarah & Lila”
“In the cemetery, look for the husband’s name. / I finally find you, Lila — stone letters / freshly carved, marble bench facing a pond for / serenity.”
Poetry |
“Carried Onward to Our End”
“But there is no resolution to unknowing, pain; / There is the pale smoke that drifts above the charnel ground. / Shadow men and women bring corpses of their forbears, / bring firewood. Light flames. Tend fires …”
Poetry |
“I Consider My Hands After a Friend Calls Them Lovely” & “Abecedarian for Sainthood”
“Amelia, the young girl I clean houses with, / bites her nails down to the skin, / comes to work on a bus from rehab. / Dusts around orange pill bottles she didn’t / expect to see there, pale moons calling out to her / from inside their powdered wells.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Train”
“The train has stopped in a sleepy, quiet time, / this is the time of memory, / of waiting. / Mother says we will come back soon / to this land where my navel was buried, / where the / morning cicada sings and where flowers / never die.”
Poetry |
“Fitting the Profile” & “Traffic Report”
“The peculiar smell in the back / of a cop car is not old cum or stale perfume. / It’s Fear 101 or Advanced Fear, or both. / How many hands against how many / cars, how many cuffed, how many heads / shoved down into that seat?”
Poetry |
“Concrete Pastoral”
“… a Target parking lot’s grey order punctured / by the aquiline nose of an unhoused man / late in his seventies, belted neat in khakis, pulling // a carry-on …”
Literature in Translation |
“I laughed in my kingdom and as king I laughed,” “no doubt a rain sleeps in the hand,” “a child shows his hands,” “life looks like you,” “but we / do nothing but follow” & “the world transforms at a rapid pace”
“but we / do nothing but follow / traces / we ourselves are / nothing but traces / of life / that is why we need so profoundly / to hold on to ourselves …”
Poetry |
“Calle del Desengaño, Antigua, Guatamala”
“Someone is burning chaff, / someone is burning garbage, someone / is singing to a radio ranchera. / Animals are crying in a far corral // as they do before an earthquake.”
Lyric Prose |
“At Café Azure”
“Late teenaged serving assistants who could be first trusted to simulate an uptight mathematical rigor without too much cologne on the lunch shift wore blue Oxford cloth shirts with dark blue armpits on the patio in the bright sun moving under umbrellas whenever they could.”
Poetry |
“River Bride”
“There’s a continent inside our bodies / built from the attar of Eve, a small boat in the river / of our veins & a burned-out church at the fourth fold // in the wrist.”
Literature in Translation |
“Translators and Traitors” & “A Writer’s Decalogue”
“Do your best to say things in such a way that the reader will always feel that, deep down, he is as intelligent as, or even more intelligent than, you. From time to time, he will be more intelligent than you are in earnest; but in order to convey this to him, you will need to be more intelligent than he is.”
Poetry |
“Ode on a Field in Norwich, Vermont”
“We have staked out this grass to save us / from certain death. We crush / our crime-scene-outline backs against it weightfully.”