Essay |
“The Hours, Passing”
“Always, even when so ill with depression that I could hardly lift my head, I have looked for what shines around me — a ditch of spring rain in Oregon, filled with the light of reflected stars and hundreds of new frogs singing …”
Fiction |
“An Ingenue Attends the Freshman Formal” & “Tally of a Loss”
“9: my age when you taught me to save myself for the right person
15: my age when I thought he was right
15 ½: my age when he wasn’t”
Poetry |
“Why Sturgeon Leap”
“Could leaping be hard-wired into sturgeon / brains since the late Cretaceous / for no other reason than feeling good, // the way cows face north or south when chewing / their cud, conforming to the earth’s magnetic pull …”
Poetry |
“Ghost” & “Cacerolazo, October 2019”
“Three million pans death-rattle this iron-celled era. // What is a revolution? // We run through the barricades of La Alameda as trash fires glow through tear gas clouds on each corner …”
Poetry |
“1985” and “Once in an Antique Shop”
“Say in a church basement / I worked the can opener around the huge tins / of government meat, while another woman / stirred it into something edible …”
Essay |
“On Weeping”
“On a November day just after Thanksgiving, a year before a virus arrived to change the world, I noticed a very young grandson’s boot in a dark corner of our dining room, where he must have kicked it off.”
Poetry |
“The Fall Flower Show at Phipps”
“See their elegant forms and the exquisite care needed to restrain their growth, / years of work to send one branch upward …”
Poetry |
“Illinois”
“The first time hatred handcuffed me was at the corner / between Commercial Avenue and Third / where it slammed me on the hood of a patrol car.”
Poetry |
“Airshow”
“A sleek fighter climbs and dives / in mock attacks, slamming the awestruck / crowd with the sledgehammer / of its booming metallic roar.”
Poetry |
“August, Old Brickyard, Chilmark”
“Mother/daughter, / we stage a scenic selfie –– masked // faces foreground, backdrop / chimney of the brick factory ruin …”
Essay |
from The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America
“In its issue from December 9, 1894, the newspaper Ha-Tzfira noted that the collection of books being brought by Reuben Sinay had increased to 120 pudi. The ‘pood’ is a Russian unit of mass, and converting this gives us an incredible figure of two metric tons.”
Fiction |
“Invasion Theory”
“The only transformation that allows for true escape is the transformation not of the one who flees but of the one who chases.”
Poetry |
“The Supermarket”
“When I read the cashier’s name tag — Penelope — / I think: she must be so lonely. She scans my almond butter, / and I imagine her response: I’m not your cliché.
Poetry |
“I Bend,” “Fruit in the Borrowed Home” & “Snow Years”
“your snow birthday is when how / many years you’ve seen it is the same as how many years / you have left (I had a snow birthday once)”
Poetry |
“Domesticated”
“I decide that the Hungarian language, obscure as it is, resembling almost nothing else. derives from the movement of Mongolians on ponies.”