Poetry |
“Irreplaceable Plates,” “O Patriarca” & “Made Up”
“Behind many extant serious love poems / you’ll find a serious love poet // ejaculating into a ficus pot. // Whether you wanted him there or not. // Always straining to make the sea sound / sexual in a new way.”
Poetry |
“The Singing Dark” & “Autumnal Equinox”
“When it was time to choose / a new body, I opted for the owl, the fire ant, / the hound dog.”
Lyric Prose |
“The Crying”
“The crying began like wind slipping through the cracks of an old window, like the cool pressure of whistling through a missing tooth.”
Poetry |
“Tacoma Narrows”
“No word is safe when our leader lies, & small lies matter / as much as big ones — one whisper of deceit // swells in the retelling, then ripples outwards in a widening / wave.”
Literature in Translation |
“Villon’s movement” & “To ex-ist? To be …”
“And if the nature of light, then, is not to be made luminous by something else, by another source, if the nature of light, is to be lit by itself, then I propose that Villon’s words aspired to be this light.”
Poetry |
“The Old Spinet”
“I riffed on this / diminutive piano — / small soundboard / and short strings fine / for starters, until the baby / grand would surely / take its place …”
Essay |
“Some Thoughts Prompted by David Brooks’ Turin: Approaching Animals“
“Like many people, I’m a mass of contradictions: I don’t buy products tested on animals but no doubt benefit, unwittingly, from experiments carried out on them.”
Poetry |
“Woman with a Trump Mask in the Medical Center Waiting Area”
“She walks with a limp to the reception window. / Overhead, the light fixture twitches and dims. I slump / down into my phone. A moment later, with a sigh / she lowers herself onto the seat across from me …”
Literature in Translation |
“The Vast Night,” “Moon Rise” & “Once”
“Often, I gazed out at you, me standing by the window / as if from the day before, standing, before you, marveling. / The new city still appeared barred to me, and the landscape, / reticent, took umbrage, as if I did not exist.”
Poetry |
“18 West Eleventh Street, March 5th, 1970”
“Dave and I awake on the morning / before in the guest room on the second floor that is / furnished with English antiques, which is strangely / the first thing I think of in my disbelief when I see / the headline …”
Poetry |
“Tensile” & “One Suspect Plate of Tapas in Granada”
“So reported an unnamed surgeon one-hundred-fifty years ago. Whose office was upstairs from a rowdy Wyoming saloon.”
Lyric Prose |
“Angel of Death” & “Reincarnation”
“When I open my eyes, blurry from sleep and medication, a scrawny old man with a bald pate and scruffy fringe sits in the chair in my hospital room …”
Literature in Translation |
“pilot mode” & “a simple math”
“pain has a unit of measure. it is called dol. there are also instruments to measure the pain thresholds – dolorimeters — or palpometers (the newest versions, based on applying pressure instead of heat as a stimulus)”
Essay |
“A Portrait”
“After lunch, the sitting. The set-up is elaborate: a narrow mirror where I can watch the portrait emerge and a cellphone camera in time-lapse mode …”
Poetry |
“Saint Andre”
“That feeling of those cruel slaps // to the wrists and hands / by the elder nuns, // their black bad habits in Catechism / Class …”