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.”
Essay |
“The Acid of the Bath”: on Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead and Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991
“When Guibert is diagnosed with AIDS, Zambreno describes his response as ‘the calm of the hypochondriac who has been preparing for calamity his whole life,’ but one could also read it as the punishment a queer artist raised in heteronormative Catholicism had come to expect in return for venal sin.”
Poetry |
“Music Box,” “Maya Miller” & “Clever Dress”
“On the part that opens, there’s a mirror. / I am not a music box, even though / I am a box shaped like music. / The music you have to imagine.”