Poetry |
“Or What Else Could We Do But Raise Our Hands?”
“… when silt, dust, / shards, erase boundaries, words / break down, and scattered letters / run wild in search of meaning // we raise our hands …”
Essay |
“Sitting for Mrs. Siegfried”
“Achieving those symmetrical pigtails meant sitting under the blow dryer, its shrieking motor barely muffling my mother’s expletives as she brushed my hair limp.”
Poetry |
“February in Deep Melancholy” and “Morning”
“She’s calling from a great distance. / The bulbs are coming back! The ones we ripped out! / They’re coming back! She’s moving around, / speaking quickly between things.”
Poetry |
“Having You”
“… partly because of your hanging back on your heels to my pushing / ahead on my toes, yes, / partly because of that I am free to push ahead …”
Poetry |
“Letter to Time,” “That Kiss” and “All Told”
“Let me say it again: / do not come back and hang out in my garden. / You’ll frighten the children / and the leaves will fall – I’ve seen it happen.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Michael Torres
“I wanted to write something that pushed back against my own work, and I just went after stereotypes that I wrote with, or through, or into, because I wasn’t sure how to navigate the white gaze back then, and which we don’t learn how to break out of until we get further in our craft.”
Poetry |
“Three weeks” and “Retail requiem”
“May we guard against those forces / shuttled through their online replacements, / may we one day understand the psychosis / that built then eroded what it built, that was us”
Essay |
“It Was the Sound of a Cloud Looking at Itself” and “Thanks So Much for the Urn”
“When I was thirteen, my art teacher asked my mother if I had always been forty. She said, well, she spends a lot of time in the barn … “
Poetry |
“Nocturne with Shaved Head”
“I learned tonight you shouldn’t / dig a grave on a Monday unless you want to dig another one / within the year”
Poetry |
“Today Is the Feast Day”
“Today is the feast day / Of moving to the mountain / And a house in the clouds / Away from the city and people there feeling / Unsettled as clouds”
Essay |
“The Coffee Klatsch,” “The Long Ride Home,” “Timeshare” and “Breathing Lessons”
“… and I’d have this nearly imperceptible fantasy while stirring the Sweet & Low into the matcha that I would cause an explosion, that our little corner of Brooklyn would suddenly burst into flames …”
Poetry |
“Who Knows, Maybe,” “Above the Graffitied Wall” and “Euphrates”
“Who, now, can recall / the impetuous fire sizzling in the veins / of the world? A cold spell, and its impenetrable / forms are dispersed.”
Fiction |
“Response”
“I’d come up with a title for the Beckett essay, which is odd because I hadn’t written a word and I usually don’t title things until after I’ve completed them. ‘Nearer My Molloy Than Thee.’ I worried about the reception of that title.”
Poetry |
“Wild Mother Apples of Tian Shan”
“Nikolai Vavilov’s family knew the gaunt aunt / of famine. He grew consumed with seeds / and craving, peeled away / in delicate curls their genetic passions … “
Poetry |
“Farmers” and “The Long Goodbye”
“Each mass I’d / Stare at the wall / Where the farmers // Stood and smoked, / Near the door, / Before the fields.”