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.”
Literature in Translation |
“Bulletin and Elegy of the Mitas”
“To Melchor Pumaluisa, son of Guápulo, / whose testicles they severed with a butcher knife / on the hacienda’s patio. / And kicking him, they made him walk / before our tear-filled eyes. / He erupted from the blows in jets of blood.”
Essay |
“Facing It”
“I used a heavy, faux-bone-handled butter knife to knock along the spine, dislodging even more unidentifiable, frangible stuff. Still there was something rattling around inside …”
Poetry |
“Phantom State” & “About the Pen”
“My brother is bent / over a computer 204 miles away. / Rootlessness is not so much a betrayal / as it is a logical extension, my father / shouts. Of what? I ask. I can’t hear his / answer.”
Essay |
“A Feast Afloat”
“Aboard our family’s 35-foot Ohlson yawl, Carousel, my mother was St. George to the alcohol stove’s dragon. She fought valiant battles to light it, at times igniting billows of blue flame and shrieking and cursing at it like the true salt she was.”
Poetry |
“Provenance,” “Fugue” & “Fin du Monde”
“Theirs, a brief effusion, brief as these words: / experience, memory, perception, exchanged / for chronic interconnectedness, surveillance, / former democratic rule turned demagoguery.”
Poetry |
“The Gulls (The Eagle)”
“There was a choice I had to make and I made it. And sometimes I think the // voice in my head tells me I didn’t make it. That everyone else made the choice, and I floated / instead like a gull over the surface of its water …”
Essay |
“Hand With Head”
“Art’s development, like culture in general, is anchored in a system of interconnected realities none of which is fully controlled and explained by rationality and linear causality.”
Poetry |
“Remainders”
“When my mother died / twenty-seven years / of appointment books / sat in her closet, / each errand noted / and checked off once done …”
Literature in Translation |
“Belgium,” “Patterns,” “Poland,” “Hooligan” & three untitled poems
“A young girl is embroidering in her chamber. / On the canvas, patterns of spears and crosses. / The girl stitches dead soldiers on a meadow / With red flowers on their chests.”
Poetry |
“The Nine Children of Mariana Gluza”
“what does it mean if your family / erases you as a child was the grief of your death / too much to bear or were you replaceable”
Poetry |
“Go On, Then,” “Fire” & “Vanishing Points”
“One of these days, Alice! / roared from the screen on weekend poker nights / while Connor or Cooney or Burke was riffling the cards. / In pajamas, we slid our faces through the staircase bars.”