Excerpts
On Power
I’d do anything for you, but you say: No, let me.I wear the pants, but you call the shots.I’m holding aces, but you’ve got tricks up your sleeve.I’m always big spoon, but you’re always on top. I wear the pants, but you look fucking hotin a skirt. I’ve read Rilke, but you’ve read Proust.I’m always …
Damming the Nile: A Poet’s Ecology
The Nile has always been the beginning and the end of all things.Baher Kamal What happens to a person when displaced from their place of origin? At the core of diasporic understanding is the separation of people from their land. Culture and its material symbols can sometimes be emulated, carried, and reinvented from place to …
13 Superstitions
Always return a kiss under the mistletoe. Kiss the boy who is with you now but always looking for someone better. Kiss him even when you know he has been kissing someone else, late nights in her father’s race car stacked on bricks in the yard. Kiss him later, for nostalgia’s sake, after he has …
Review of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout
Few novelists write characters as improbably multitudinous as Paul Beatty. In The White Boy Shuffe, Gunnar Kaufman is a poet, basketball player, and messiah. In Tuff, Tuffy Foshay is a drug-slinger, competitive eater, sumo-wrestling enthusiast, and candidate for city council. In Slumberland, Ferguson ‘‘DJ Darky’’ Sowell is a sax player, jukebox sommelier, porn film composer, …
Ten Reasons Why We Cannot Seem to Make Progress
As long as the cheerleader keeps watching the movie about cheerleadersand the businessman keeps a copy of The Art of War in his attaché case. As long as the money retains no memory of where it has beenbut keeps running like a river Until going to war is explained in terms of child development Until …
The Knife and the Knife
A knife loves a knife. It loves in midair, like a thing without feet. The knife that falls in love is not a knife. It is a magnet. Look at them shine as they draw each other in! Two knives scattering sweat let out a cry, cross each other for a moment in midair, lie …
Shoots
From Fatigas tropicales Tree, sprouts. Air, sprouts. Light, sprouts. I have pulleda cluster from my left eye. I rise and eat from curdled fruitsthat taste like Island. I fell the word Island and make a tableto organize my family and exercise the memory of my dead.Flesh, live again. Let crows feed upon youand regain their …
Vision of the Body
For Jorge Angel Pérez Why is it nowas we leave our youthand beauty behinddo I find the bodiesof budding girls and boysso beautiful,the irreverent gaze of others.Now that gray hairs show themselvesand my flesh is less firmmy legs less firmas they outrun death.Now that skin’s glowthe brightness in my eyesand smooth foreheadslowly recede.Now that my …
Some Photos
From Viaje de regreso IAutumn days.On my balconya bonsai blooms. IIMigrating birdslook for place. Somefind the wrong one. IIITenuous light in the courtyard.The clotheslineis a highway. Translated by Margaret Randall