Poetry |
“Ice Cream Truck”
“We will have cones, please. / Vanilla with rainbow sprinkles. / We will have the whole ice cream truck / and the street it is on. One serving / of the fence by the water. The water.”
Poetry |
“Walking to Synagogue on Yom Kippur” & “A Rock Is Not a Stone”
“… and before I could recall her name, the daughter / said: Who is Maya? and I thought, She’s not an angel.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Day Jupiter Met Saturn (Another Colorful Story)”
“From this angle, she looked less like a living woman than a watercolor painting, frozen as if she were very calm, and in fact she was, only she couldn’t feel anything anymore, she hadn’t for a long while.”
Essay |
“The Latest Scar in Time”
“May I clarify more of the ‘crack-up’? The non-speaking self draped itself with a different garter and gown, of the reading and reflective self — a near impossible person to share with others in mixed company …”
Poetry |
“The Lunch Lady: A Pantoum”
“What was her story? We didn’t care. / She was just the lunch lady; / the one who forced us to eat our sandwiches. / I can still see her reaching into the trash.”
Poetry |
“The Needle and the Thread”
“I live inside a book, the girl says to herself / We are all alive inside a book / That’s what you think, says the front door.”
Poetry |
“Histoire” & “Idyl”
“When I lifted my violin, the men at the bar // begged for Skynyrd, not Coltrane. / So I volunteered to be lonely.”
Poetry |
“Bitter Greens,” “Matisse in the National Gallery,” “It Is What It Is” & “Field Notes”
“If they could speak, they’d sound exactly like / those cranky ladies slowly poisoning themselves / on front porches up and down Brenwall Avenue / in 1964 …”
Poetry |
“Scrubbed”
“The house smells like candles. ‘It’s my birthday!’ I say. / It’s not. My birthday over, nothing left to celebrate, I rinse the pot, heave it / back on the stove …”
Interview |
A Dialogue with Joy Ladin on Shekhinah Speaks and Gender Transition
“I realized that the Shekhinah – in Jewish mystical tradition, the immanent, female aspect of God who silently dwells within each of us – was both a precise and safely obscure metaphor for my sense of being female despite being born male.”
Fiction |
“Otra Noche En Miami”
“Santi and I came here — I mean Miami, not Mango’s — to be queer as fuck. Queer as possible before being shipped back to Honduras, closeted and impossible.”
Literature in Translation |
from Decarceration
“And in a flash, this insight that you are / matter which has crossed centuries of flesh, // which makes you feel how much you are, / already, there, / off the subject.”
Poetry |
“I Want to Be an Adirondack Chair”
“I want to have a front row seat / when the neighbor’s paper gets delivered // at four am.”
Poetry |
“Nothing Takes Me Back Like the Sound,” “Lilith Dreams” & “Lincolnville Beach”
“Fractal facts of our existence / matched us up: we are a species // that sees archers, horses, heroes / in the sky …”
Essay |
“Filling In the Shadows”
“Perhaps our unconscious need to reclaim our identity — our sense of self — explains why we go to great lengths to replace the body’s lost accessories — the ones we can live without but often define us in others’ eyes.”