Europe
On a too hot bus, my sister and I traveled through fields of sunflowers.
Because we couldn’t stop arguing, we sat rows apart.
I see us staring out the windows. Or eating the food we took ...
On a too hot bus, my sister and I traveled through fields of sunflowers.
Because we couldn’t stop arguing, we sat rows apart.
I see us staring out the windows. Or eating the food we took ...
after Samiya Bashir
Long: a measurement; the distance it takes to remember.
Remember: everything that had to fall.
Fall: the end of summer’s tyranny. ...
I find her seated at the kitchen table at two a.m.,
her red dress a large heart in the dark’s chest.
I flip the light switch: she stares past the empty ...
I have buried my share and hardly anyone knows.
A house must hold ghosts, writing
Names across funereal woods and windows ...
Hugging you’s hard enough when you’re awake,
but to worm my arm under your downed trunk,
plutonium-core sequoia, and hold on? Pft. ...
In the airless, fluorescent lung of a department store,
I am trying not to laugh at the wolf’s face
printed across the crotch of a pair of boxer briefs.
I nearly buy them, but decide I’m not ready to
forget the joke. For how, out of necessity, they’d fall
eventually into regular rotation, become my wolf ...
I woke to rain
and wondered if that meant
the sky was trying
to be a prayer. Teary-eyed
and drooping are the clouds
inside my voice ...
Make me write like a dog
gnawing a bone. Not anger,
but that animation, that knowing
focus and breath. The just as easy
letting go,
down into the dirt, ...
after Forrest Gander’s ‘Deadout’
I.
Procure his bone-dry clay & burnish,
synchronous glide and precision. ...
The children have left the red ball
disintegrating in the backyard.
Half-gone, it’s a dimpled dome
for dead grass, brittle and yellow— ...
& the trees gleam wetly under the luminous clouds
& through a water-ribboned window a child draws pictures ...
I recalled for the therapist a rabbit skin I bought
At summer camp, at the camp trading post,
When I was nine or ten using cash my parents
Sent with me my first trip away from home.
I waited a long time to get the rabbit skin,
Waited in line a long time for the popular item,
The most popular item for sale, and in the rush ...
On the one side
there are hummingbirds
plucking secret fruits
from the tongues of foxgloves
& a shimmering woman ...
I’ve only seen them build nests on underpasses, on buildings, in the shadows of London Bridge— ...
I am soft with healing after
I am luxuriant with good fortune after
I am cloaked by lady beetles a scent of salted olive, my nature after ...
makes simple nests in caves or clefts eats large amounts of carrion
especially susceptible to poisoning was poached almost to extinction ...
for Panella
It was too generous for gunshots,
too casual for fireworks. Our house ...
He came to me in a dream,
wet as a newborn in his new skin.
I readied him for a bowl of bitter world
(the cathedral two blocks away from our flat in the city),
like an invitation I didn’t dare open,
like one long road of night, cold, and hard as hail, ...
Possumtown Neighborhood, Piscataway, NJ, one mile
from the Middlesex Sampling Plant site, where radiation
cleanup from ore sampling in the 1940’s was projected to be completed in 2000 ...
The dead have the whole city to think with
the fla-vor-ice tube the whole tongue cherry red.
Trapped below the lake, the slow sharp breath,
the mottle, the dogskin, the fiberglass, the uncertain ...