poetry

Hampi Resort, India   brushstrokes of wind   blue-gray cacti and the thick teak trees   honeymooners in their hammocks drinking tea that’s mostly milk   black cows white cows   between each mountain a flush deepening   they say … Read More

  No one goes downtown. I see an empty square and name it after you. In the yard of the house you used to live in, the flowers shed petals, the grass overgrows. These corners still seem yours. At night, … Read More

Lower the shovel and flatten the ground. –Gerald Stern   Mostly, denial, the nerves in abeyance— add one day and a stoop sets in. I churn my shoulders to undo it, but stooping stays. It has happened. The present edits … Read More

  On the beach the shark is dead: its marble eyes leak jelly, its underbelly, slashed, bleeds pinkly onto the sand and flies like copters circle round reporting on the immense good fortune of its disaster. Dead as a doornail, … Read More

For K.J. Baker   This is abroad where you die any age orienting your map. This is between shell shock and PTSD, the war the greatest generation served in, my grandfather on ship, sea, sky. Only four stars to the … Read More

  Was this one of the girls I knew those twenty years ago? I seek a word in Arabic for blue and find “azraq” and blood is “dam” and bird is “tayr” and swallow is “sununu” while shirt is “qamis,” also “bluze.” … Read More

  Google the girl with the blue bra And you will find her lying, raw Forced over, knocked down on her  back Her legs upraised against attack From fully-clad helmeted men Who stare down at her abdomen Yank off her … Read More

  Someone says, we’re living through an age the ancient Greeks would understand, internecine, unrepairable as red ceramic shards. The famous poet calls the soldiers babykillers, says fuck them. It’s time to resist the lyrical, she says, to write as … Read More

  setting forth     an ex- a present     position     point act     of exposing     state of being     exposed   displayed     disclosed wares     details     laid open disposed     of former     opposed for want     of shelter     warmth   a surface     laid open to view     revealing     … Read More

Tr. from the Portuguese by Calvin Olsen   I see you do not want things to continue This way In this particular case We speak of forget-me-nots A flower about which we understand Nothing    

  We were walking past your dead grandfather’s house, and I left you as if through a door in the air. I wanted to tell you, but you were speaking in the streetlights glow. Your words made a room where … Read More

  What I cannot name I almost never think about  or what love has joined together, I said, and approaching you is like a light coming through the place where shadows meet,  when I can’t sleep,  you look incomprehensible.  Is … Read More