Literature in Translation |
from The Abduction / Le Rapt
“Me, I’m divorced / Don’t panic / it’s not so bad / except if you’d been there / my child wouldn’t have been taken from me”
Poetry |
“Dad and the Eye Exam” & “Milk Run”
“My chin rests in this little sling / and I let you come back from the dead. // Go ahead, sit by the magazine rack / as the optometrist taps our history // into the record …”
Essay |
“Nightwalking”
“Sometimes it seems I spent my childhood walking at night, hiding in ditches, calming wandering dogs. Of course, that was only part of my childhood, the night half, the hidden half …”
Poetry |
“I Do Not Always Feel Sad When I Think About Humankind’s Eventual Mass Extinction”
“Today in the park, roses / dormant, the foliage all / undressed for the wretched / months to come, my daughter / waving from her stroller / at squirrels, I heard the hawks / circling …”
Poetry |
“Growing Up in the Mouth of the Wolf”
“Firearms enforce the wolf’s freedom. A boy/must learn to be/a wolf. //The wolf swallowed me. The men/of my childhood hated. They ate/with their eyes.”
Poetry |
“Dream Song” & “Born Again”
“From our team leader with secrets / I felt the graze of her gaze on my legs, / I grew lean, played guitar and drew portraits, / inhaled the scent of roses …”
Poetry |
“King Street”
“The noise / from the Greek / restaurant downstairs // subsides, leans / into the shoulder / for the walk home, // a little quiet, / a little drunk …”
Poetry |
“Year of the Snake”
“My long-ago Braille teacher / suspected me of peeking at the little / bumps on the page. I was flattered / And also insulted.”
Poetry |
“The Zone of Instability,” “Bevy of Beauties Blacking Out” & “This Wee Lock”
“The photo displays some of the 73 members of SHARE (Share Happily and Reap Endlessly), an organization of movieland housewives who put on a minstrel show to build a diagnostic clinic for retarded children …”
Poetry |
“Imagine That”
“I learned about Mr. Harrigan, tracked his slaveholding. / We found Mr. Colrain when my wife’s mother sent old papers / no one read at any more. By chance we discovered / their joint tenure in the South Carolina legislature.”
Literature in Translation |
“The First Step,” “Dionysos in Procession,” “The Satrapy,” “Sculptor of Tyana” & “The Displeasure of Selefkides”
“It’s hard on you, born and raised as you were / for the noblest, most magnificent challenges, / that this frustrating destiny of yours / keeps blocking recognition and success. / Trivial things are forever in your way, / pointless small concerns, despondency.”
Poetry |
“The Generations”
“When my father spoke to my aunt from Guaynabo, / I cried when he said to me, his face pale and drawn, / ‘Your cousin tried wading through an undertow.'”
Lyric Prose |
“The Neighborhood of Make-Believe” & “My Mother Looks for Me as a Baby”
“We came to your side of town wanting to get away from our side. We brought this desire with us. Carrying it in suitcases. Sacks that weighed on our backs.”
Poetry |
“Shorn,” “Visitation” & “All movement mimics other movement”
“I say, for a bloom born of / a time of temperance, your ticking is lush. / which is to say, I miss afternoons detonating / in the growing sound of insects.”
Poetry |
“This Summer the Girls” & “Relics of the Mountain West”
“This summer the girls are all wearing blue / fingernail polish, looking as if they’ve drowned / or suffocated, or been poisoned by carbon / monoxide. As if they’re trying on for size / death …”