Poetry
To a Rosh Hashanah Challah
Sweet bread, stern in youreternal roundness, I sneak piecesof your crust at midnight— for isn’t yours the sacredcircle that we want for asweet new year? The baker infused youwith honey to make us happy,& maybe her kitchen miracle will work: sugar the bitter, renewour sour apples in an orchardthat greens the table. Sweet challah, you’re …
Dove
bichwa ke mare ordhniya ke torde,tohar najariya jaherile jaherile. A scorpion stings me, its toxins swim my veins,one ill prick from you and I writhe in your fever. I dream I cough up a songbird I release to the sky,you board a plane to take you across the desert. I will tie messages to the …
Prayer Book for Vanishing
Anything black nuh good.Jamaican Patois Maxim White mirror of morning,the body is yours. Yours the faceto anoint with Epsom salts, clean teaspoon of bleachaside in the decanter.What holy water. Approach the angelsto efface this blackness,another tar baby, self I am scorching. In the nightfind nothing but a dagger of teeth.Pitch-black marrow, vile pigment unwanted,set fire …
A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers Public Health
The industry thinks I’m too dumb to back down; they don’t knowI do this for my mom and dad. They were 69 and 71. He had pulmonary fibrosis, worked with asbestos all his life. She grew upnear the coke ovens back when kids were sent into the mines to pick coal. So they both had …
Poem against Selfies
But I have so much to say! For instance, did you realizethat insects are the most diverse group of organismson the entire planet, representing approximately80% of the world’s species?That at any given timethere are an estimated 10 quintillion(10,000,000,000,000,000,000)individual insects alive,that the number of (living and dead) species of insectsis said to be, at a minimum,30 …
Origin
That evening, while the pasta boiled,the man said to the woman “Let them be white . . .” And as though the earthrumbled and shook—or rather grew from inside a slate of nothing,three gold-skinned balls spun into the air and broke open: many years later,when my arms and legs turned solid and …
High Heaven
for Rosalee He who loves gives a hostage to fortune.] –Friedrich Nietzsche Another stinking diaper to thankGod for, why we traveled all the way to Bethlehem,Alabama, to get this,slept in a crummy motel for a month waitingfor her to be born, mud-wrestled every bureaucratin the state, pressing inky fingers on every pieceof paper they …
Carmen
after Catullus Late snow today, and flower bulbsare already sending their fat shoots upthrough wet mulch along the sidewalk.Sparrows flit through the bushes,taunting me with their song of spring.I imagine how one would fit so perfectlyin the palm of my hand, how warmit would be. I’m tempted to believethe lies these birds sing, but I …
My New Friend
In a photograph, her father’s capis jaunty, his beard wild. A hooded falcon poses on his outstretched handand he is everything you want your father to be. My new friend doesn’t wear makeup.Her feet are tiny, tattooed. She’s broke, but spent a whole summer drivingthe craggy roads of Iceland. She says that in Reykjavík, they …