Poetry |
“Little Soul Contemplates Skin as the Largest Organ of the Body”
“I wanted to be heard by // everyone in my life exactly as I / sounded to myself, wing, singing, but the words / kept imploding like the fragile / soap bubbles I tried to blow gently / to the top of our elm …”
Poetry |
“The Libyan Poet Recites in Brighton, Massachusetts Before He Is Prepped for Surgery”
“Would our bus stop take him / To St. Elizabeth’s in the morning? / Scheduled for the anaesthesiologist, / He said “abdomen” as if I could understand.”
Poetry |
“First Haircut” & “Scientists Overlooked the Snake Clitoris, Until Now”
“I looked down at the wisps that still held the shape / of curls, the small tunnels of hair I’d finger on my head / to distract myself from whatever was going on …”
Lyric Prose |
“Bernini In Love” & “Looking at a Desert Landscape Painting While Isolated with Covid”
“But she eluded him — not just in the statue, which he worked on alone, day after day, but in the tumble of tapestries where she lay naked and laughing on his studio floor.”
Literature in Translation |
from The World and Varvara
“I once read that it was so cold at Lenin’s funeral that the musicians had to wipe their instruments with vodka so their lips wouldn’t stick. That’s about how chilly it was on the January day some eighty years ago when Varvara entered the world.”
Poetry |
“Leaving Childhood” & “At the County Fair”
“Suddenly, I felt sad for the hardness / of polished floors where things hit and break, / get swept up, tossed in the trash, not left // where they fall, to be buried under / layers of earth …”
Lyric Prose |
“This is me signaling you in Applesauce and Canned Fruit” & “So many mixed messages as I push my body through Athletics”
“So many varieties of ruched bra-like items and comfy leopard pants you can lift purple weights in. They brush against my unformed self.”
Poetry |
“I Dream About Buying a Gun”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody, / I don’t want to cause sorrow or pain. / I don’t want to kill my enemies, / but I dream about buying a gun.”
Interview |
“A Conversation with Alta Price on Translation”
“It’s easy to bring one’s own baggage to the work of translation, and I’m convinced one of my key tasks in this profession is setting all possible presumptions aside before I sit down to work every day.”
Poetry |
“After Reading Bashō, I Remember the Rain”
“I found a quail’s nest under sage plants near the house / woven, I think, while we were traveling, / & the yard seemed abandoned. // The hen burst out under a torrent of hose-water / I unknowingly sprayed into the leaves.”
Poetry |
“Reading Nadezhda Mandelstam in Virgin Islands National Park”
“Every trinket and provision and provocation arrives / By ships riding over sunken ships few remember. / The sea turtles surface for air only when it is safe. / Time is boats rocking their length against waves.”
Fiction |
“A Collision”
“A tall short-haired blond woman got out of the Honda who looked familiar, vaguely, and then both were standing in the cold in the alley, and first one said, Are you okay? and then the other said it and Caroline said, My puppy dog’s a bit rattled, and the other was so sorry.”
Poetry |
“Returning” & “Shimmer”
“… we pass what once was America’s tallest / radio tower, flickering red now / to tell the planes there’s something here / sending sound out into the night.”
Poetry |
“January 29”
“He’s stage four, small cell lung. He shrugs. / A guy he knows feeds his flock, / but he doesn’t sit with them. He doesn’t know their names.”
Poetry |
“Messages”
“The porch light shining on my bedroom ceiling / means my son isn’t home yet and the clock / glows an hour I used to rock him in my arms / with the stealth of a woven web.”