poetry

  Grateful I wasn’t the one my mother miscarried. Grateful for being blind in only one eye, for having all my fingers. Grateful a homemade explosive never went off in my hands. Grateful for coffee soaked into my mustache, for … Read More

  I’m wedged against a man holding the pole with one hand, an iPhone with the other, he’s working a crossword’s checkered semaphore of blacks and whites, each space an emptiness to be filled, girded with meaning. Slowly he pecks … Read More

  When my evangelical cousin texts You just must never have witnessed a miracle   I think of Doug punting the basketball. We were ten. He kicked it a good thirty yards,   uphill, meaning only to get it to … Read More

  This garden, its descendants of Stanley’s anemones, flowing, pearlescent like the insides of shells, their offspring mine now, in my yard, fragile beside the orange blare of Dugan’s trumpet vine— the garden’s almanac of inheritances swanning around my own … Read More

Translated by Aviya Kushner   Open the window open it what do you already have to fear tear the window what is already out there breathe the wild skies beauty and pain small fish, rodents, clouds, life flutters under a … Read More

Translated by Aviya Kushner   He was not relevant, in the Population Registry they lost the documents, in the Interior Ministry they claimed it wasn’t possible to verify facts, I signed a declaration and swore in front of the respected … Read More

translated from the Hebrew by Aviya Kushner   Pretty hands, ankles still pretty, white breasts, fattish ass (from where this plenty?) strong gaze weak sight nine-and-a-half years and more countless years I have forgotten love. Forty-nine years and I have … Read More

                          after the painting by Pieter Bruegel   The table is always set. We can eat our way through anything. Memory and desire silence the squeals of the slaughtered— never spoil our appetites. Gluttony, an empty eggshell with legs, carries … Read More

                          after the painting by Pieter Bruegel   Travel is travail the shortest trek is turmoil Mother Earth holds us close so low there is nothing we don’t look up to we are occasions for compassion or cruelty whatever’s in … Read More

translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain   A villain can’t be someone concrete. A villain can be a neighbor, but not mine can be a leader, but not yours can be you, but not the real you can also … Read More

  Alanus ab Insulis insisted the soul Gets fastened to the body “with tiny little nails.” With tiny little Medieval nails The Latin term for their fineness—subtilibus— Attaches itself to my childhood memory, And won’t let go. As if our … Read More

  I hear the hawk. It will not show itself, the short, high whistle sounds from the trees. If it were punctuation – a dash between this and this. Does the groundhog hear inside its burrow, where on top it … Read More