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.”
Fiction |
“Toads Down Deep in the Loam”
“On the morning of his first day of school, Henry pours the water out of his thermos when his father isn’t looking and slips a toad inside. He leaves the lid loose so it can breathe and finds a cricket in the yard so it has lunch.”
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.'”
Literature in Translation |
from Dendrites
“Nine years ago Leto was still a toddler—how old was she then, two? three?—yes, she’d just turned three when the fires broke out and the whole city burned for three days and nights, for three days and nights stores and houses were looted, the smoke seemed to trap and incite unspoken fears …”
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.”
Fiction |
“The Cards”
“The request for more money came through email early one morning, before Jeff was out of bed. Mark had just made a pot of coffee when his phone pinged. Chelsea’s mother is requesting an extra $1,200 for supplies to support her pregnancy …”
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 …”
Lyric Prose |
“Longest Day of the Year” & “Looking Good”
“I was married then and my husband also went to the show and so did my dad who was visiting and was Mickey’s generation, more or less.”
Essay |
“The Man in the Red Car”
“One day, two federal agents in suits knocked on my door. I can’t recall if they said they were with the SEC or the FBI, or whether these were local agents who had been farmed out. They assured me my father wasn’t in trouble …”
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.”