Poetry |
“Variations”
“Jenny showed us patterns on her viola / through the spastic tinkle of Zoom. // I tried reading some of my Goldbergs poems, / mostly inaudible.”
Essay |
“Guesting”
“I didn’t know then and don’t know now if the notion of cost/exchange brought me closer to the woman who made you possible. Or to you, even while our bodies were like braided dough in your bed on the floor …”
Poetry |
“My Mother’s Pocketbook”
“… a linen hanky reeking / of Jungle Gardenia, / a rain bonnet folded neatly // in its plastic sleeve …”
Poetry |
“After a student tells me her allergies are due to botanical sexism, I look it up” & “Summertime”
“Growers bred new cultivars / avoiding troublesome lady / or hermaphrodite trees; // they bred boys, boys, boys all day …”
Poetry |
“Unwritten” and “Prayer at the Masked Ball”
“I’ve worn this face // since birth, / and now I want // it off. / I need a god // to remake me …”
Poetry |
“Figuration” and “Pandemonic”
“The silence of lawn chairs in falling snow, / half-built houses draped in tarps, / satellites that blink across night sky, / their lights a pulse that leaves no trace.”
Essay |
“Kostis Palamas Does Not Attend His Own Funeral”
“And Kostis Palamas drifts, then sits on a hill. A hill of trees. Reciting his poems against the Occupation — certain salve of Greece that is its history and its disease.”
Poetry |
from “Mandarin Pandemic Diary”
“Now the neighbor’s black cat is already hunting. / Birds, be careful. I’ll be careful. / I remember. I forget. / The black cat, like rain, disappears.”
Poetry |
“Last November” and “Tracks”
“The heat broke in the night and we woke to our breath / swept the ash from the hearth lit holiday mailers / with a long lighter so logs would catch …”
Poetry |
“Ololyga” and “ordure”
“Soon it was ash falling on everything falling / on the invisible frequencies of an Internet of pain // the women had strung across and through themselves.”
Essay |
“’Then was the fear a little quieted’: at the reading last night”
“Ralph read some poems about bears because he saw Hayden Carruth read, & Hayden said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to write nothing at all except poems about bears?’ & so Ralph wrote ‘a garland of bears.’ & some of those poems were about Hayden …”
Poetry |
“Ghazal w/Tequila,” “Ghazal w/Road,” “Ghazal w/Salt,” “Ghazal w/Bowl,” “Ghazal w/Sleep” & “Ghazal w/Open”
“I want to be the flesh around the stone, the thing consumed / at the kitchen sink, the juice down your arm, the peel, a ribbon of road. // To be the bus come to rest in its bay; to be the bay: that oily harbor.”
Poetry |
Three Poems by Sappho
“And if now she runs away, soon she will chase; / if she refuses gifts, soon she’ll bring her own; / if she won’t love you, soon she will be longing …”
Poetry |
“Reading One of Wright’s Notebooks” and “Heat Waiver”
“The clouds, a marriage / of mirages. // There’s an argument / to be had. / Close at hand.”
Poetry |
“A Yellow Cab Driver”
“Then I think of my mother and the nights / she crab-walked home after peeing herself behind the wheel. / She couldn’t find a toilet on the clock.”