Poetry |
“18 West Eleventh Street, March 5th, 1970”
“Dave and I awake on the morning / before in the guest room on the second floor that is / furnished with English antiques, which is strangely / the first thing I think of in my disbelief when I see / the headline …”
Poetry |
“Tensile” & “One Suspect Plate of Tapas in Granada”
“So reported an unnamed surgeon one-hundred-fifty years ago. Whose office was upstairs from a rowdy Wyoming saloon.”
Lyric Prose |
“Angel of Death” & “Reincarnation”
“When I open my eyes, blurry from sleep and medication, a scrawny old man with a bald pate and scruffy fringe sits in the chair in my hospital room …”
Literature in Translation |
“pilot mode” & “a simple math”
“pain has a unit of measure. it is called dol. there are also instruments to measure the pain thresholds – dolorimeters — or palpometers (the newest versions, based on applying pressure instead of heat as a stimulus)”
Essay |
“A Portrait”
“After lunch, the sitting. The set-up is elaborate: a narrow mirror where I can watch the portrait emerge and a cellphone camera in time-lapse mode …”
Poetry |
“Saint Andre”
“That feeling of those cruel slaps // to the wrists and hands / by the elder nuns, // their black bad habits in Catechism / Class …”
Poetry |
“Farmer / Videogame” & “Translator (Delivery Truck Driver)”
“I was ashamed / to need my co-worker Adam’s // help lifting cab from chassis. First / the transmission fluid flowed / dark red. Then the gaskets // blew …”
Literature in Translation |
from Study of Sorrows: “This Evening,” “[After Illness, my earlocks”], “[Who planted that banana tree”] & “Feelings in Spring”
“Should I take a walk / somewhere, like those happy, healthy people? // Let me wait for the sun to dissipate the mist and see / whether this is really a good day.”
Literature in Translation |
from Transparencies: “To Know How to Approach,” “1980,” “Riverbed” & “Dorsoduro”
“To know how to approach. / How we see the riddle of distance / from here to where the places we’ve lived thicken. / I summon the islands of heather and ice / the Atlantic dawn / a plane in ascent / hard verses of gulls like fine chains.”
Poetry |
“Common Ground,” “Eating Greenland” & “Thirst”
“I thought I was finished with beauty, / having shed — given away, or sold — so much / and committed myself // to necessary objects only.”
Fiction |
“Open Mic Night”
“She had to catch it, both for its own sake — creatures like that couldn’t survive in strange habitats — and for hers, since she didn’t belong here, and so she must have something to do with the bird, another out-of-place stranger, probably in trouble. How did she get here?
Lyric Prose |
“Spare Change”
“She’s standing by a column. Sole of her right foot on the wall. Blue jeans, black hoodie, café con leche skin. Could have been my younger sister, if I had one. Do you have spare change?”
Essay |
“Duglegur”
“‘Sóley,’ she says, which I understand to mean creeping buttercup. She tells me I can pull them out. Their spindly stems branch off in every direction.”
Poetry |
“Arrival Day” & “The Future”
“Here is / the bridge // they said / they’d burn // when they / got to it …
Literature in Translation |
from All That Dies in April, a novel by Mariana Travacio
“I’ve been telling him we need to leave, but he doesn’t want to. He’s attached to this land, he says we were born here and we should die here, too. But we’re the only ones left, I tell him.”