Poetry |
“The Shell of a Shell,” “Ives, I Did Not Look at the Finish Line,” “The Bus Stop” & “They Run Around with Stuntmen”
“You change horizons, too, when / you swallow saliva, dear // reader. We play with image like / the indigenous, Italicized. // I take whatever I’m prescribed, / low behavior’s / low behaviors …”
Fiction |
“Sebastian”
“When his mother tucked him into bed those nights, she said, Be sure not to get sand in your sheets, did you wash it from your fingernails and hair? to which Sebi would reply, Mama, I stayed on the tram today, and she would kiss his cheek.”
Poetry |
“The Speed of Light” and “William and the Fox”
“She wants to know, now, / how the skin told the lamp told the bulb / to pace itself — / to illuminate the dark in stages, / to prevent a shock.”
Poetry |
“Dear Henry Rollins (Former Singer of Black Flag, Now History Channel Host)” and “Artist Statement”
“And who among us, wishing form on the zeitgeist, / denies that the tension between profit and hatred can succeed // in unmasking the ghost as the greedy land developer?”
Poetry |
“I Built A Wall,” “Dead Branches,” “Always a Cradle” & “Via dei Cappellari”
“No trees around. / It’s in me they fall / dead weight and all.”
Poetry |
“Roots”
“I want to make space. / I want to know my place. // I want to have that much / give.”
Essay |
“The Folly of Existing”
“Consider the command: ‘Do as I say and you will reap the reward.’ We hear these words often; what we do not know, what Abraham himself could not know with certainty, is who speaks to us thus. Is it God or Satan?”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“A poet’s job, if we can call it a job, is not to be a stenographer, recording in blunt shorthand terrible moments … so culpability might be determined. A poet’s job is to remind us of the networks along which feeling — traumatic and otherwise — travels and oftentimes warps: cellular, familial, temporal, sociocultural, historical.”
Poetry |
“Beloved Country,” “Failure,” “Ars Poetica” & “The Exile”
“So much of you remains unopened, like music lost inside me. / Country to which I return every time I go broke. / Seal, celebration, vault of trunks.”
Fiction |
“The Queen of Language”
“Valentina wears the standard issue orange jumpsuit with “Probation” across the back, and when she sees me enter, she waves and smiles as though we’d run into one another at a coffee shop. She has run away, been re-arrested, and bounced from the streets to the Halls many times.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Janel Pineda
“Growing up, I internalized a lot of shame around being Salvadoran. Poetry became a space that allowed me to claim this part of my identity, explore it further, and take pride in the people and place I come from.”
Poetry |
“Empty Bus”
‘Some day, an auto worker / promised a young poet // in long-ago Detroit, Some day / the world is ours. Maybe Levine / guessed the dream’s cost …”
Poetry |
“Andrew Wyeth’s Footnotes to Chambered Nautilus (1956)”
“3. I’ve painted her propped-up in the bed, half-committed to rest and half-poised to climb out the window, to join the noonday orb and to let that much heal her.”
Essay |
“My Piano Teacher Talks to God”
“It always took me a while to readjust from my fake piano to Ms. Kim’s real and very beautiful piano each week at the start of my lessons. But once I got into it, I was pretty good.”
Poetry |
“My Body as Hot Metal, My Body as Ornithology”
“When the boy closes his eyes, / does he remember the light / barbs of my fingertips? Does he / see my elbows as the arches // of the South 10th Street Bridge / cradling thousands of crows?”