Poetry |
“Collective Effervescence”
“… the lifeless laptop screen packed with / opaque square frames or off-tinted faces — / the skittish connections — Zooming in for poetry / class — sometimes just a nose or an eyeball / appearing …”
Essay |
“Remembered Bodies”
“I hear the last lines of ‘Leaflets,’ which Adrienne Rich published in 1969: I’m thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need. And all my body’s forces of animation try to tell me, still, that the task to need better ought to be our common business.”
Poetry |
“Science Matters” & “Going Through”
“I can’t remember what kind of car came next / I was starting to move into my own constellation / & my sister got married & had children who now / Have children & my parents flew past Andromeda …”
Poetry |
“Matches Ghazal”
“Small talk, wine, homemade ragù, more wine, then surrender, lubricant, your bed / a mattress on the floor. Locked bodies confuse the moves made in a tango and a match.”
Poetry |
“To the man in the pickup truck who screamed obscenities at my 15-year old sister,” “Full Moon and a Storm Coming, You Tell Me” & “Winter”
“Your grandma used to call them hurrycanes / in her foamy Cape Cod accent. She knew / the slower the storm, the greater the loss.”
Poetry |
“Tragedy By the Sea”
“… & knowing we’ll be bored with age / one day & want / to see how time played / Us, to take/ a picture.”
Poetry |
“To Gratitude” & “Leaves of Him”
“You secure his weight to my mastitic chest for our forty-third bus ride / from hospital to home. / You coat his saliva rash with petroleum jelly, coax him to eat a smashed avocado / and swaddle him, too.”
Fiction |
“Maestro” and “Through”
“The number of firepit watchers increased and it struck me that more than a handful seemed disapproving of my presence. Had some mention of me turned up in the county newspaper concerning one of my interests?”
Lyric Prose |
“The Enchantment of Death: Briar Rose”
“Every child who learns a story by heart learns his or her own story. Unbeknownst to the child, it speaks inside her, through the forms of the fairy tale, the life knotted in her blood that will dissolve over the years.”
Literature in Translation |
“The Beloved of the Dawn”
“Eos, goddess of the dawn, once slept with Ares — every Rosy Fingered One sleeps with him once. Aphrodite surprised them …”
Poetry |
“The Problem of Foliage”
“The human approach, to do one’s utter best / to identify, number, and trace the shape of each / as far as the picture extends (to keep the picture small) …”
Literature in Translation |
“Honeymoon”
“I was looking for some Goyeneche among my records on the corner shelf when all of a sudden, he asked did I have any pasillos? I stood there like I’d been struck by lightning. What kind of Yankee had tastes like that?”
Essay |
“This Lviv”
“Your memories of the Holocaust, did they produce any true anguish in me at the time, or did I feel they were sad fossils imprinted in bygone air? Yet those memories give rise to the rough gnarls in me that hurt my gut.”
Essay |
“At The Dakota”
“So I stripped a lot of paint — and later, upon becoming a principal in the firm and eventually the president (a title which simply indicated that I did everything myself), I restored a number of the larger apartments in the building to their former 19th-century glory.”
Poetry |
“1970”
“The children wrote to soldiers in Vietnam / to learn about language arts and geography. / The popular girl’s pen pal wrote back, sent gifts, / strode into Room 6 once on leave, all camouflage / and smiles.”