Poetry |
“Morbid Curiosity”
“In myth, death comes by boat. / Or midway upon the journey of our life. / I think about it, the closest I’ve come to death …”
Poetry |
“To Virginia, Lucia & Sylvia”
“There is no doubt. Had I lived / when any of you lived, / I would have been committed // to an asylum.”
Poetry |
from What Is It, from the Black notebook, 3/24/25-5/1/25
“feel free to tell a story or / two about them // feel free to see / that you also / are becoming / an anecdote or two”
Poetry |
“Like Us”
“Tendril moves / inexactly toward light / as if it sees the streaky sky / through bracken / from its dead-end cranny”
Poetry |
“The dead tree and my brother fall”
” … into the poem like the branches / holding this fort, first his, // then mine, what he built and / abandoned like our family …”
Poetry |
“The Midnight Zone”
“It’s snowing at the bottom of the sea — / dead skin, dead plants, sand, soot, dust, and shit / falling from the light into Earth’s deepest hole.”
Poetry |
“Always Abundant”
“Once, in the other life, I had no name, / and only the insides of the insides / of things glowed. Now I feel cobblestones // of Marrakech rush up again through my feet …”
Poetry |
“Atopolis means without place“
“river carry me forward / from my displacement // from my place between rivers”
Poetry |
“The Ringing,” “Bare and Live” & “Madness”
“How thin the line between the eye / and darkness that runs like a thread / in the hem of a dress …”
Poetry |
“Exile” & “This Tree Is Sorrow”
“I visit him every Christmas / where everything is dry in the vacuumed / memory sealed by death: the cracked / beds of his thumbs …”
Poetry |
“London,” “Full Moon Over Beirut” & “The West Indies”
“A man reads a newspaper on the sixth floor. / He looks up and out at the open-air —/ once a wall, now an overhang, cliff of brick bombed last month.”
Poetry |
“San Francisco, 1992” & “The Boys”
“… You count them off: / ghosts with hard bodies and ghosts / with wet tongues, ghosts with slick fingers / and convincing eyes …”
Poetry |
“Butcher Song”
“Blitz of sun off blade, six a.m. Phạm Văn Hai Street, the butcher / drags two glinting metal bowls onto the sidewalk …”
Poetry |
“Kapuśniak”
“Let the smell remind us / that we’re not that far / from the deep belch // and thunder of tanks …”
Poetry |
“Mother’s Day” & “Bad birds”
“Still I struggle to rise, breathing in the quiet, / trying to believe in patience / as I teach the child to make the bread, to mix the flour and water …”