Poetry |
“On the Island of Sark” and “October 8th”
“You, gorse: I slow my steps / around the thorns you bare to take // the blood of the unaware.”
Literature in Translation |
from Pina
“What she had was better than a first name. Tera Vahine. That Woman. Nothing cruel about those two words. Not when they’re just words. Just a way to name the person they all steered clear of.”
Poetry |
“Little Brother”
“You cough in your sleep and I almost pray for the first time / in eleven years. Just because I’m not religious / doesn’t mean I don’t want to be.”
Poetry |
“As if Confusion Were Part Of It”
“I remember standing in line by the river to be baptized. / The heat had soaked our clothes. There was singing / and honey locusts perfuming the riverbank. And flies …”
Poetry |
“Goshawk”
“It’s a big falcon that sits so still / it could be a twisted branch / of the tree I stood under / for ten minutes, chatting / with other birders …”
Poetry |
“Cayucos State Beach” and “Bangkok”
“We come to the same shore each year, believing we know her tide. // Dark kelp with flies, sand dollars, washed / bones — my sister, ankle deep, captures white-ribbed wavelight.”
Poetry |
“Anthropocene Villanelle”
“I plant seeds, they sprout, then disappear. / The satsuma tree curls its leaves, distressed. / Still, the weather’s beautiful. And I’m here …”
Poetry |
“Pheasants”
“… waiting for the grass / to quiver, waiting for them to appear / in the near clearing, / the brazen male, the subtler female, / three bronze chicks behind …”
Poetry |
“The In-Between” and “Manus Miraculum”
“I sleep in the top car / of a broken ferris wheel — // I race away from the sun / and feel free in the fog …”
Fiction |
“We Are the Daughters of the Witches You Never Noticed”
“It might as well have been a wild shadow, a melancholy tone from a dream that echoed into waking life. And that echo had been growing louder.”
Literature in Translation |
“Sleeping Beauty,” “Eurydice,” “Persephone,” “Silent Writing,” “Winter” & “Loss”
“They will kill me, sever my voice, / cut my throat, cut me out / of the wedding photo, / tear out my heart / and its assignations, / if they discover I’m unfaithful – / not with someone else / but with myself, / and not just once in a while.”
Essay |
“Maggot and Tare: From Elegy to Self-Elegy”
“The separation between the dead and the living becomes, if only fleetingly, no longer ‘definitive and fateful.’ It is instead a frail telepathy, a murmured voice at a séance, a portal between life and afterlife …”
Poetry |
“Host,” “Vacation Dinner” & “Yoga Revolution”
“Noticing something different / than the rest, dark spot on my bikini line, / I killed the shower / to get a good look, tried to brush it off, / but it was stuck.”
Essay |
“In the Beginning: the Importance of Wildlife in the Development of Human Thought”
“He named man and woman but left the animals nameless. A horrific act — not to be named. But left the naming to Adam as a stronghold against the void.”
Literature in Translation |
from Belle Greene: “The White Marble Palace, 1905-1908”
“Belle had prepared for her interview with painstaking care, acquainting herself with the Murray Hill neighborhood in which the library was located and learning all she could about the man she was going to meet. John Pierpont Morgan.”