Poetry |
“North Sonoran, Year’s End” and “Man ‘o War”
“Good days, I can imagine / myself like this: // slowly weathered into / something less me, / what sounds like being erased // but is also less ego, less belief …”
Poetry |
“Don’t Do It — We Love You, My Heart”
“Julio De Leon is pedaling across the George Washington Bridge / his trim form, though sixty-one, leaning into the eastbound breeze // as tractor-trailers apply hydraulic brakes and shudder / in between the honking cars …”
Poetry |
“Vertigo Over the Niagara,” “Breaking Crystal Dragonflies,” “Red” and “On How the Russians Started Saying Goodbye”
“I sense in your Cuban voice that sorrow will always return / I’m trembling but it will always return and won’t do any good / It’s a bull bleeding in my memories”
Poetry |
“In a City I’ll Never Return To” & “The Cake in My Father’s House”
“Cake was supposed to be sweet, / though still I ate it, // said yes to a second piece, refused to refuse, licked my plate.”
Essay |
“Fermi’s Interaction”
“My father was working towards his Ph.D. in Chemistry, with ventures into bio-chem, and he was part of handful of students who were studying with Enrico Fermi, who had recently arrived at Columbia, a year after winning the Nobel Prize for his discovery of slow neutrons …”
Poetry |
“Wings” and “Caryatis”
“Bird bones frame the door of the cottage where girls about to be crushed by stones await the sacrifice of their sour clothes. I wait, too, like someone many lifetimes ago, already dead at the beginning of everything.”
Poetry |
“Say Their Names”
“People suggested she change her name, / but she thought not. No one suggested he change his, / she gently pointed out. At which the audience exploded.”
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.”