Poetry |
“Someone called looking for me” and “It would be nice to see each other again”
“Suddenly I thought of the house on the port, / of the bee swarm besieging the terrace / and of you not calling for too long a time.”
Fiction |
“The End of the Line”
“I claimed the first empty seat I found, happy to leave our conversation on the platform, but when he wedged next to me, it seemed certain to continue.”
Poetry |
“It’s Eerie” and “My Fatalities”
“Again, I hear that stream humming up / against those dark, cool hours called wedding night. / The river folds farther and farther away, / though its descent / is soft as an old kitchen cloth …”
Poetry |
“Renvyle: Night Collage Seven” and “Salt Meadow”
“After the winter storm departed / we found the gunwale of a wooden boat / washed up in our garden, and from somewhere, / decades ago, my mother’s voice reciting: Where / did you come from, baby dear?”
Poetry |
“What do you need to know?” and “Wallpaper”
“The junkyard littered its way across / acres of oily sand and scrub, an engine coupled to a birch, / a hammer tied by grass.”
Essay |
“Let Us Once Again Praise Creative Writing Workshops”
“For the aspiring poet and teacher of poetry, what better field placement can there be than assimilating the subtle, helpful, and uncompromising critiques of one’s own drafts, as well as one’s classmates’ drafts, by poets of rare accomplishment?”
Fiction |
from No. 54
“I call up Madame D. I’ve had another offer, I say. How much? she asks. Twelve and a half thousand a month, I reply. Then you’ll get the same from us, she says, and whispers, Now I own you.”
Poetry |
“The Enchanted Bells”
“He tested the timbre of the bells / The vendor had wrapped for him. / The headlines were no better / Than the ones at home.”
Essay |
“Assembled”
“Chaos theory says that things are difficult to control, unpredictable. Sometimes, trauma can be a quiet, quick wave of a hand. Nearly undetectable … Sometimes, it is the sound of car doors slamming an end to the conversation.”
Poetry |
“Against the Wind” and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
“In some daydreams I know my dad / enough to commit him to the VA / or to a converted storage container / spruced for aging veterans by kindly, / enterprising undergrads.”
Poetry |
“Puzzle Map”
“Made a kind of sense, her country / for her grandson to hold on his lap, turn upside down, / shake if he pressed the states down tight.”
Poetry |
“Say Your Mother Returned From Death”
“Or maybe she’s been hanging out on Willie Nelson’s / tour bus all this time, drinking coffee and sucking in / second hand weed because someone just gave him // a new bong to try out”
Poetry |
“The Holy Embraces the Holy”
“The chaplain was Muslim, Ali, // and the patient was not that kind of Texan. / ‘If only more Muslims were this nice, / the world would be a better place,’ / the transplanted lone-star said to me. // Leaning against the wall, hands behind my back, / I nodded in cold agreement.”
Essay |
“Trash”
“That afternoon, I wrote on the board: Lucille Clifton said she wanted to write a poetry that would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”