Poetry |
“Sunk Cost Fallacy” & “Winter the Rain”
“… you suffer without me, / who, sleeveless in the heat / of July’s last morning, / will be squeezing plums / in produce when your eldest / calls to say, “Dad’s / taking his last breath.”
Essay |
“Preservations”
“A lifelong binge drinker, he’d lost jobs, wrecked a car, punched holes in the wall of his house, but what had made my grandmother throw him out for good was stealing the three silver dollars my mother had won in an eighth grade essay writing contest.”
Poetry |
“Jericho, Oxford” & “Ektopia”
“… we settled in the end for the pure girl face / that I turned to consider the street / down which the boy and the men had gone / in search of bookshops and better drugs.”
Poetry |
“Have You Been Watching the News?”
“Every time I look at the dog, I remember she is going to die. / Sometimes I cry while picking her shit up from the yard with a plastic claw. / Next week she will turn one.”
Literature in Translation |
“Atlas” & “Y2K”
“No aircraft appears in this photograph. Instead, a mountain of trash bins overflowing in the background. Empty tuna cans, coffee filters, dirty diapers, used needles, cattle bones.”
Poetry |
“My Father for the First Time,” “Death, Second Person,” “Summer Wind Up” & “The Tempest”
“He practiced flamboyant grudges, drive-by / destruction. And yet I imagined he’d forgive. / Death can do that. You forget, you reconcile.”
Poetry |
“Juvenilia”
“She found the bird beneath the tree. It was a kinglet, / ruby-crowned, a juvenile. Stiffened by the time it took / to find it, fledging dropped from the numbered nest.”
Poetry |
“Souvenir From the Gone World”
“I asked the address / of his childhood home // and was told, It’s on Second Avenue — / You go down a little hill, / then half way up a hill …”
Literature in Translation |
from Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems
“Yet another dagger pulsing under the rain / Diamonds and deliriums of tomorrow’s memories / Taffeta sweat homeless beaches / Madness of my flesh gone astray”
Poetry |
“Dear Deborah” & “The History of Western Philosophy”
“The body is nothing, trembling here / Waiting for the room with its antiseptic bed / To be clarified and readied — a life suspended / Between two infinite middle fingers …
Fiction |
“Walking on Our Knees Backwards Home”
“… let me assure you the pain eventually will subside, but the memories will continue to haunt. Even after 65 years, my imagination wades to the bank of the Tallahatchie River where my son died.”
Poetry |
“What I Want Isn’t What I Want to Want” & “And What of the Fleshy Contents of My Skull?”
“I want to dig in, eat fancy-lace polymers / for breakfast, each inorganic molecule /’ a unicorn in captivity.”
Fiction |
“Infection Control”
“The citrus scent hit her nostrils, the smell of long ago summer days while polishing the big cherry dining table to the sound of Little Beth and her friends chattering outside while they played four square on the driveway.”
Poetry |
“Ars Poetica III (Time Destroys All Things)” & “When We See (No Joke)”
“And in plain sight the missionaries and pickpockets — the mouths they refuse. / Including the baskets and hours that form the world you have no use for.”
Interview |
“I Will Not Walk Away”: A Conversation with Jennifer Franklin
“Anne Carson has famously said that poetry isn’t therapy. I agree. Poetry is better than therapy. It’s always been poetry that has helped me transform the trauma, grief, and suffering of my lived experience into art.”