Poetry |
“April 9th, 1965, Appomattox”
“I lived not far away in Lynchburg / where my friends identified me as ‘Yankee’ / since I was born in the north and had lived there / for a while …”
Poetry |
“Exercise Path Off the Lackawanna River Heritage Trail“
“But does / our distanced bond / with nature, along with / a shift in focus / so far from where we are, / mean we already seek answers / elsewhere?”
Essay |
“Coming Back to the Page 101 Times,” an excerpt from Craft
“My struggle with meditation taught me an important lesson about my creative process: the imagination flourishes in that split-second before the editorializing and judgmental mind intrudes.”
Poetry |
“Five Ways of Being Alone,” “Sunday Morning, March 13, 2022” & “Rules for the Dance”
“He can never get the help / that would help him feel / the help that he never received. // And therefore he / is beyond help.”
Poetry |
“Entering the Genome” & “Dirge for a Dying Barn”
“The DNA comes back / whispering secrets / you can’t connect / to anything you know.”
Literature in Translation |
from Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex
“Retired Lieutenant Dostoevsky, age twenty-seven, for having taken part in criminal designs, having circulated a personal letter filled with impertinent expressions against the Orthodox Church and the sovereign power and for having attempted, together with others, to circulate works against the government through means of a private printing press, is condemned to death.”
Essay |
“I see a postman everywhere”: Elizabeth Bishop’s Postcards
“Bishop often mailed postcards from locales while expressing a longing, on the written (verso) side, to be elsewhere. Or she editorialized the postcard’s depiction of her location, adding captions, often ironizing or qualifying it.”
Fiction |
“Eid Mubarak”
“Her dad said it like a punchline: ‘In December, there’s a card, white inside, and handwritten: Eid Mubarak. I nearly fell over.’ Few of their neighbors knew that Eid was the Muslim gift-giving holiday. Back then, even fewer cared.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Missionary”
“It was pointless to warn him about the perils of crossing the sea and the dangers of the continent noir, the newly branded missionary would hear none of it. He left as if off to his honeymoon …”
Poetry |
“Little Soul Contemplates Skin as the Largest Organ of the Body”
“I wanted to be heard by // everyone in my life exactly as I / sounded to myself, wing, singing, but the words / kept imploding like the fragile / soap bubbles I tried to blow gently / to the top of our elm …”
Poetry |
“The Libyan Poet Recites in Brighton, Massachusetts Before He Is Prepped for Surgery”
“Would our bus stop take him / To St. Elizabeth’s in the morning? / Scheduled for the anaesthesiologist, / He said “abdomen” as if I could understand.”
Poetry |
“First Haircut” & “Scientists Overlooked the Snake Clitoris, Until Now”
“I looked down at the wisps that still held the shape / of curls, the small tunnels of hair I’d finger on my head / to distract myself from whatever was going on …”
Lyric Prose |
“Bernini In Love” & “Looking at a Desert Landscape Painting While Isolated with Covid”
“But she eluded him — not just in the statue, which he worked on alone, day after day, but in the tumble of tapestries where she lay naked and laughing on his studio floor.”
Literature in Translation |
from The World and Varvara
“I once read that it was so cold at Lenin’s funeral that the musicians had to wipe their instruments with vodka so their lips wouldn’t stick. That’s about how chilly it was on the January day some eighty years ago when Varvara entered the world.”
Poetry |
“Leaving Childhood” & “At the County Fair”
“Suddenly, I felt sad for the hardness / of polished floors where things hit and break, / get swept up, tossed in the trash, not left // where they fall, to be buried under / layers of earth …”