Poetry
Mediterranean
I A bright red boat Yellow capsicums Blue fishing nets Ochre fort walls II Sahar’s silk blouse gold and sheer Her dark black kohl-lined lashes II A street child’s brown fists holding the rainbow in his small grasp IV My lost memory white and frozen now melts color ready to refract
How to recognize a werewolf
The old verses suggest a cannibal; a man who can tell you you taste like pig. Here is the meaning in the myth: A real werewolf howls not to the moon but for the moon. He will say she is silver. Leviathan in the night window. So bright all he can see are stains in …
The Sun Sleeps in Your Womb
The orchard of uncertainty that we planted yields its fruit by night, when the sun sleeps in your womb awaiting my seed. We know nothing of the minerals and the buried toys, nor of the bumblebees that carry pollen between two warring states. The earth smells of forgotten damp and the footprints of our childhood …
Migration
Last night and for some days preceding a holy migration: of praying mantises, earthworms, and a single black salamander with yellow spots, the slick shiny black wet body of him moved slowly just outside my front door, gentle, on the mat that says ‘‘Welcome.’’ I am thinking now of your ability to survive—somehow, amid fire, …
WHEN YOU BRING IN THE PAPER
You’ve seen these photos before, empty bird cage ribs of a child sitting in the dust. But this copper, naked body, shining supine on the front page of August 2, 2011, seems more insect than child, swollen chest, a thorax, bent limbs jutting at angles, hip fleshless as the joint of a Jerusalem cricket, skull …
MAKING LUNCH
Because nothing I see this morning brings us closer to spring, snow falling out of the Jersey sky into the cloudy river, wet shoes facing toe-in by the stove, the uppers spotted with rock salt and because each sound signifies winter— wind in the wires and the far-off train like the voice of a child …
GREY BIRDS
When I glance out the window three grey birds fly through me and fade as dots in the gloomy June sky. I’m one of them now— maybe all three. Or are the four of us now someone I knew a long time ago, just becoming conscious of the fog?
BACKORDERED
Each morning she drank her tea and then stamped the used tea bag onto thick creamy paper. She did this day after day, weeks became months, until she had nine tea bags across, thirteen down. When I understood how long I’d be in bed, I took my time with catalogs, thumbing through pages, folding corners. …
ANGER: THE RAPE
No cruelty is like the cruelty one turns against oneself after being raped one feels covered in slime and shit said the old woman grimly This place used to be a park now it is a parking lot ha ha for which I am in the ornamental fringe don’t tell me I should get over …