Poetry
Luna
Unlike you, Khaled, I was told to look at the moon, know her hard, decipher her changing countenance so I could learn to know myself, but disobeyed that injunction too, worshipped instead her lesser twin. My native tongue has only one word for both moon and month, one luna that begins in a sliver of …
The Snow of Petals on the Fallen World: Some Second Thoughts on Capra
And yet, at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, After the clement snows have come again, And the American miracle of money, The petals still remain fallen from the rose. What’s been restored is the life once fled from, And while George Bailey’s met his angel, He’s also felt the black wind that lives …
Student Conference
At first, I mistook the small, black tattoo for a phone number or a date jotted in haste on her wrist’s paler underside— then suspected stitches when it didn’t fade. I was not far wrong. (Her poems: careful, deliberate, thin as she was, haunted by a mother years dead—not a word about the brief grief …
Landscape in the Style of Li Cheng
What if you could breathe into words what happens during the quiet relinquishments of rain in the city, the deepening grays and the hard surfaces ringing? Or that fall when my roommate would come home from the restaurant at midnight and we would go running through the empty streets, then along the river, which was …
Song of the Entomologist
Now, blowflies the size of dimes appear on windows and walls, and carpenter ants eat the house inside out and send out scouts. Soon, earwigs will fall from laundry fresh off the line, and mosquitoes whine in the bedroom all night. Angleworms will tunnel in the dark, and night crawlers, quick and slick as your …
Drisheen
Call it a sheep, call it a cow, serve it with raisins and a little salt. Inflate the casing with a forearm, yours or your mother’s, blend one serum with another, commingle with the animals. The stuff inside us has a residue, something that sticks to the filter-rib, the plane tickets and palm trees, the …
German Helmet
One of the boys lugged it to the porch. One poked it. One cracked a joke. Then someone gripped the rim, patted it like a dog. And nothing happened. No yellow burst of sulfur. Yet touching what a real live Nazi once touched felt electric. One by one we overturned the neck-stunning weight on our …
Puberty, as Poem by Akhmatova
The scarcity of milk— that was me, and the queue for a new pair of shoes. I was the Russian verse of frozen feet, the worst winter in memory. I was snowfall left piled on New World Street. I was the boots that walked me black. In the year of the long freeze, other girls …
Teaching English in the Biology Lab
The sea life chart is a prop For Melville, the mounted cat A visual aid for Poe. Pigs and rabbits, unborn, sit On shelves like family photos While everybody opens Their textbooks to Dickinson And Whitman, Wharton and Crane. Tenth grade is the year for frogs Dissected, worms halved and pinned. It’s the year of …