Essay |
“Innavigable Sea”
“A gaze that, never leering, still seems to undress me, to see something of my insides that should be left there behind my eyes.”
Poetry |
“The Chinese Have Landed”
“Across the room, even facing the TV, / the son has dropped his head. Let him sleep. / The glittering efficient inner rooms / await us. The masked proficiency / of everything near the end …”
Poetry |
“Russian Chocolates,” “In Siberia, I Watch My Host,” and “What Is It Like?”
“Here men from the Caucuses are yanked from the metro / escalator by police demanding their papers. / Back home men and women of color are pulled over while driving …”
Poetry |
“What’s An Angel Like?”
“But then I remember the one / that struck the glass, then fell / dead on the roof outside our window, / 25 stories above the river …”
Poetry |
“Lupus Est in Fabula” and “A Four-Footed Strange Beast”
“When a man struck a wolf with his club / she leapt and clawed the skin off his face. / Once healed, the man began to howl like a dog.”
Poetry |
“Cow Magnet”
“That that would happen / In the dark of an actual / Body was impossible / To believe but / We believed it …”
Poetry |
“Hip Check” and “Convent”
“When one lights on my wrist softly / my mind fails — an easy rush of wild trust / that cold will protect me, simply alter // my chemistry …”
Poetry |
“Hatboxes”
“Every / carpetbag and portmanteau that’s ever / been bumped along a corduroy road is broken / and our jeunesse is gone …”
Essay |
“The Weather Brewer”
“The whacks, the wallops, burning the underside of an arm, the rake of one ringed hand along a ridge of boy-skin — all of these were consistent in exceeding their ostensible cause.”
Poetry |
“Lumiere Premieres”
“The two together keep time — / suddenly ah there’s steam / and a puff of smoke. / Quick break for a drink.”
Fiction |
from Days
“… all the ways in which nature is animal, nature is human, and then swallows the human, absorbs it like its own blood, poor or rich, all of us roaming in our clothes like divots, like bumps with mirrors coming out of them …”
Poetry |
“Clearcut,” “My Dead Husband’s Birthday” and “Heartbeats in a Pandemic”
“I’ve built a stone chambered cairn / where I can buffer the worst of grief. / Most days it stands firm, glinting in / muffled light or winking rain. / But cairns have chinks. Things get in.”
Poetry |
“Like A Breathing Tadpole!”
“… how she jumped with strong legs from ragged wet outcropping to cool reeded corner, when my brothers and sisters and I crowded around the opening of a hot spring, our tails retracting …”
Poetry |
“Now Calls Me Daughter,” “To the Larger Pile Decaying” and “Now in Autumn: Sonnet I”
“Now aims her life to be all-purposeful, like flour, like a cleaning agent, like the perfect black dress she said I should wear to the interview and, also, her funeral.”
Essay |
“The Mariner” and “Mauve”: from Plastic: An Autobiography
“He underestimated desire, the frenzy of passion for the glittering Empress in her cage of color. Perkin had found the first product with global demand to be made from coal tar. His discovery opened the way for drugs, fertilizers, and plastic …”