Poetry
Who will die tonight?
Afraid to Pray
Dear God I’m afraid if I pray for my daughter’s safety you’ll blithelyallow her to get raped or abducted or crash on a highwayon a perfect summer day. Forget I mentioned my daughter. What daughter? I remember how Anne Frank believed in the goodness of mankind.I wonder how she felt the moment her diary was …
Maricón
In memory of Emile Griffith (1938-2013) and Benny ‘‘Kid’’ Peret (1937–1962) And a man who has found prowess in boxing,grant him favor and joy. – Pindar I "Whoever controls the breathing in the ringcontrols the fight," my father says. Smell of sweat,Vaseline and bleach, sting of ammonia. "The art of self-defense is crucial." The gym …
Migration Narrative
What wilts becomesthe world for the weary.They can’t help but wonder at the lovelyshadow touch of anotherwar’s rubbled song. If crossing freely into firecan churn the blood’shollow music, then surely the orphan canask at dusk for waterand get more than spit.
Top Ten Signs of Climate Change
1. My father tells a story of a severe winter that lingered through March: The earth shook; my cousin was swept away by a tidal wave. That winter, my father dug up a frozen sewer main by hand to unthaw it. Fishermen had a good salmon catch that year. 2. I inhale too many mosquitoes …
Morgan: A Lyric
Come with me if you want to live, the great-chested Schwarzenegger commands in Terminator 2. I’ve never seen it, I confess, clicking to another station. No, too busy rereading The Iliad, Morgan says. At the Met, Leonardo’s drawings: faces where things erupt, the flesh deformed in bubbling lumps; a man on whose chin a growth …
Uncensored
for Redd Foxx Sometimes I dream of a solar eclipse in my eyes I have grown too weary of the naked eye and its weaknesses in the light beyond gentle reflections and their sensitive images there are darker hues sinister colors and obscene visions I want to wield to drink spirits and howl blasphemies to …
Fragment: After Ida
In the black and white Polish filmin which the beautiful localplays the nun. In Warsaw,she meets her aunt, once powerful,now alcoholic, who directs her to hertrue past. I am struggling with understandingunsure which past is mine.In the film in the scenewhere the actress wears her deadaunt’s dresses and heelsafter the aunt has killed herself.I am …
Anodyne
I Just north of Ward, South Carolina,the pong of the paper mill writhesthe air southward, across the orchards, all the wayto Johnston,where creeks coil through their motions;small seeps carry through ditchesto and from my father’s pond, where catfish rippleacross the bottom, stir updelicate skeletons of their forebears. A stray dog,wolflike, with a snout long and …