Poetry |
“Three Days,” “Coppice” & “Cicadas”
“I think he didn’t want me to see. He told me to go check the rods. / When I came back, the hare’s jacket was off, his intestines were out, and we baked him on the grill.”
Poetry |
“Chronological Still Life,” “Copy 2” & “Musical Instrument Using Gravity 2”
“I want to paint with / the actual fruit, here on the table, / not a copy but the thing itself — / per Jack Spicer, to make my poems / out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon the reader / could cut or squeeze or taste.”
Lyric Prose |
“Ashes, Ashes”
“The ash content in the atmosphere creates gorgeous sunsets over the still waters of Lake Tahoe — where I stand on its northern shore considering the aperture settings on my camera …”
Poetry |
“Often,” “The way out is to forget” & “All I Float Past, and Below”
“During a neighborhood walk, the pharmacy’s an arm’s length reach — / lipsticks and opioids — I’m quick to avoid the alley running / alongside this moment, knife-lined and spit gobbed …”
Essay |
“Both Silence and Words”: Two Books, a Video, and a Surveillance File
“Carmen Bugan, a writer whose life has been marked by borders demarcating the speakable from the unspeakable, the thought from the crime, the self from the state, the I from the We.”
Poetry |
“Field Days” & “The Old Mill”
“Last together behind his wood shed, / making out against the worn shingles / until his girlfriend tracked us down, gripping // a pitchfork …”
Literature in Translation |
“The Wasp of Time,” “A Glass Dress” & “Peephole”
“It won’t let me part, it won’t let me inside — / so we’ll stand here like this and we’ll look / at each other this way today, tomorrow, forever. / O my enemy, mirror-eye!”
Fiction |
“Fengshui”
“When Ying died of an unknown disease at age 36, her only son, a thin and short 12-year old boy, could neither afford to hire anyone to move her body to the family graveyard, nor do the job by himself.”
Poetry |
“Things I Forgot to Tell You”
“At times, I can still be twelve and play alone with nothing to lose but marbles. / At times, there’s a distance between my faces. / One haunts one’s own life.”
Poetry |
“Doxology” & “Great-Grandfather Thacker Talks in My Ear”
“Buzzed on Kool-Aid and ginger snaps, / we build a temple from Popsicle sticks. / My friend Glenda sees Jesus’s face / in a piece of toast …”
Poetry |
“Myers-Briggs” & “Minivan Mafia”
“I took a personality test that claimed I was a passionate idealist, so I printed off the results and flossed my teeth with them because I refuse to be compartmentalized into eight different traits like deli meat tubs at a sandwich shop …”
Poetry |
“The reign of dinosaurs ended in spring”
“Whatever worldlings mutation made, / the eons hatched endings: immolation, ice. / Only our latest extinction arrived // from without, a sentence tied to a stone …”
Literature in Translation |
from Professor Schiff’s Guilt, a novel by Agur Schiff
“The past I am being asked to submit to you, distinguished members of the Special Tribunal, is my family heritage, for good and for bad, and when it rears its head, I cannot pretend to be surprised.”
Poetry |
“Poem Begun on a Map of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery” & “August”
“Headlights in daylight, / I scrawl in the blank space / by the Old Croton Aqueduct, where I stand / looking down on the graves, / the hearse, the procession of headlights.”
Poetry |
“Wyoming” & “The Baker’s Wife”
“Each hold tools of the literate — / he the volumen, the scroll, she / the wax tablet and stylus. / But oh, how the experts go on …”