Poetry
Nothing Else
Who put a feather in the suggestion box? Who says that I should fly? I can sing, if nothing else, and failing that can strut around in heels, or carry them hooked on the fingers of one hand, my fluted glass in the other, or can let them drop like birds that always die in …
What Is the Sisterhood to Me?
Do you know yourself? I thought I didat 19 when my boyfriend calledfrom the hospital to say he’d been hitover the head with a fire extinguisherand got kicked out of school becauseof some dumb bitch. Who’d predictI’d drive to Westchester Generalthat night, four hours, to see how badit was, like a bus accident localizedto his …
Lament for the American Space Program on Halloween Night
The ten-million-years-ago stars, those glittering fool-makers,impassively contrast their frigid perpetuity with my heart’s transient thud-thud. At my feet, the leaves skittering across the driveway say: Thanatos! Thanatos!as if to shush me with the bug-holed currency from life’s latest bankruptcy. But let me tell you all aboutthis year’s spooky costume, an idea filched from an old …
Eating Phở with My Grandpa
Nod
I’m ashamed I miss the congregationthe teamwork cheering the Lord’s descent setting us apartchosen as we are I miss the altar the laying of hands the suturing the melodies that vindicate howsoever we needin the hour we bleat like sheep confused & loosed into the blur I want to be among them again nodding bonded by certainty that I’m in the worldbut not of …
The Buses of Montevideo
This special bilingual feature by Jesse Lee Kercheval is a departure for us, but we agreed with the author that for those with both languages this would be a study not so much in translation but in the dynamic of language variation and nuance that these versions of the poet’s imagination offer us. We hope …
Drought as Desire
orange groves to protectin a land of mini-malls when seasons stopped I accepteddrought as though it were life we had no water we learnedto harvest in thirst
Trade Matters
for a slave to snore in sleepingis counted a very great fault indeed no-one buys an adult slave (domestic—wild from inland is a different matter) the worst is the treacherous weatherthe tedium, the wearisome monotony Note: from Ternate,
View of Toledo
after El Greco Beacons on the skyscrapers hovered,The river’s black mirror jeweled with their lights. Watch as the exotic crosses loomed into viewOn top of the Byzantine church. The sign for Homestead floated overhead,And then a sky as wide as the river valley Working in the darkness in a world of flame,Ladles the Dippers above …