Excerpts
luam & the flies
umbertide, asmera, new york, october, 2013 It was the end of the world.The world was ending. I sat in my house with the flies. Thoughthe night was dense, was long, we tried to wait for light, to last.But the wind at the doors. & darkness knuckled, flashed its teeth.Outside, the other houses, outside, the solitaryfield, …
Elegy for My Mother’s Mind
When I steady your step on the stairs, you ask not once but twicewhere we’re going—to the car, to the store, Mom, remember? You laugh and say you thought we’d be walking and we are,right into the part of your brain where you’ll lose me, lose the child who picked all 43 tulips you waited …
To a Rosh Hashanah Challah
Sweet bread, stern in youreternal roundness, I sneak piecesof your crust at midnight— for isn’t yours the sacredcircle that we want for asweet new year? The baker infused youwith honey to make us happy,& maybe her kitchen miracle will work: sugar the bitter, renewour sour apples in an orchardthat greens the table. Sweet challah, you’re …
Charcoal
At first I didn’t understand what I would be guarding. When they said “cave paintings,” I pictured canvases hidden underground, like art stolen by the Nazis, but they turned out to be drawings of animals, in charcoal, right on the walls of a cave. Nobody in the village knew about the cave before then, except …
Cartography
It seemed the problem of my adolescence was the yellow line. The Nubian God slapped the switch on the wall and peeled the quasi-converted space in half by light. Toward the end of the driveway, my skateboard lay on its side like a capsized tanker. Beyond that, the solid yellow line. Like the stripe down …
Marco Polo
George can hold his breath underwater for a very long time. Take for instance now, as he reaches his one hundred and fiftieth Mississippi here in Nicole Petr’s dad’s mansion’s pool. He’s been submerged long enough that he can almost pretend there’s no water at all. But he’s got his eyes open, and he can …
Swimming in the Rain by Chana Bloch
Chana Bloch. Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015. Autumn House Press. If the current American poetry world divides into “barrelers” and “lingerers,” as poet and critic Dan Chiasson has put it, then Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015, places her among the fine lingerers. She continues after …
Limber by Angela Pelster
Angela Pelster. Limber. Sarabande Books. Trees are the subject of Angela Pelster’s debut essay collection, Limber. Pine trees and poplar trees, sycamores and saskatoons, fig trees, maple trees, trees outside the essayist’s window and trees as far off, theoretically, as the moon. While the title Limber seems to conflate the words, “lumber” and “timber,” it …
Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones. Prelude to Bruise. Coffee House Press. Saeed Jones’s first full-length book, Prelude to Bruise, is a necessary piece of contemporary poetry that bravely tackles issues such as abuse, promiscuity, homosexuality, and racism. Though the title hints at an agonizing inevitability, the collection implies that a bruise may, in fact, denote healthy progress. Jones’s …