Essay |
“On Portraiture”
“Maybe because survivors of the Holocaust, when I was growing up, left much of their interior lives unspoken — to hush up their own memories, to protect their children — I tried to teach myself to read emotions on the human face.”
Poetry |
“A Framed Photograph”
“The day after my father died, / his boss, Charlie, came to our house / carrying a box. // Early evening, / my mother and I welcomed him / into the foyer.”
Essay |
“The Way to Loreto — A Very Brief Poetics of the Fathomless”
“The Loreto-Principle states that it is impossible for a historiographer who sets out on a pilgrimage from Rome to Loreto to ever reach his destination. He will ineluctably get lost on the way.”
Poetry |
“Resilience V” & “Lying Flat”
“‘We don’t want to see ourselves in five years.’ Tired of building their platforms, all the young people began to slump in their chairs.”
Literature in Translation |
“Onwards,” “Too Philosophical,” “Doll,” “The Comfort of Complaining,” “The Benefits of Talking,” “To a Writer,” “Self-Reflection” & “I Wish I Had”
“How ghostly my life / in its fall and rise. / Always I see myself waving to myself, /’ floating away from the one waving. // I see myself as laughter, / as deep mourning again, ‘/ as a wild weaver of talk; / but all this falls away.”
Literature in Translation |
“Sacred Sun,” “My Language,” “Poetry’s Silence” & “X-Askuñ”
“They ask me about my language, how it is made. / I tell them they should carry a pitcher to the creek. // They want to know about this wailing. / I tell them to walk in a place of rocks.”
Poetry |
“We Drew Out the Feeble Language”
“Vienna in August and we walked / Klimt to Mozart, drank / Wiener wasser, a phrase that made our odd // American hearts laugh …”
Fiction |
“Family Portrait with Trees”
“From the window, a girl looks back at herself. She is six. There is a storm in her bedroom: thunder, his breathing near her ear.”
Fiction |
“I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs”
“Claudia was in Palm Springs because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs.”
Poetry |
“So Many Wars,” “The Salt Cathedral in Zipaquirá” & “Love Poem for My Brother”
“Hard to un-learn the art of leaving / when I’ve had good teachers all my life / to show me how it’s done.”
Essay |
“Irrigation Days”
“Mark caught his first wife cheating — there was even a detective involved, over from Fargo — and married his second wife right after the divorce. They were both named Tammy.”
Poetry |
“My Mother’s Hands” & “By Chance”
“These are the hands / that pour his evening drink, / the one we all know / he should not have …”
Poetry |
“The Night Children” & “If I Had Been There”
“There’s no village, no country / that isn’t being mapped / by night children with their folded wings.”
Poetry |
“sobriety”
“i can’t tell you about the drinking / unless i tell you about the past // i don’t want to tell you about the past / because then you’d see me shake”
Poetry |
“Three-Legged Dog”
“She’s overweight and quick to cry, my sister, / who licks Jiffy from a tablespoon, who wants to know / why I call her husband an asshole in front of everyone / when he enters the room.”