Excerpts
Election Supervisor, Bosnia
I don’t remember the name of the city or who was shooting at whom. Instead, I see the shimmer of the toilet bowl, its pearl-like shine. Eighteen years after the fact, I’m still on the floor trying to curl my shoulders behind white porcelain. A foreign correspondent once told me that bathrooms are the safe …
When My Phone Trembles (for D’Angelo)
When my phoneTremblesAfter midnightI never think of good news: Someone’s birthday An overseas friend Forgetting The Time difference I never smell Apples baking Or …
The Beginning of the End of Hummingbird Cake
In the pineapple is the fiber we’ve been looking for, the sweet yellow threadiness we’d never confuse for stitches, for wound. In the banana is the quickening rot, the rot being the softest, sweetest stage of the fruit. *This is not Hawaii. There are no resorts here. We swim in no ocean but in One …
Street Dog Dreams: Lodhi Gardens
all nightshe dreams of gold jewelryburying her aliveand fine fine silksthat smell so sharply of fearher teeth ache then when the humans comeclattering their feetin the yellow squares of lighttheir breath heavy with desireand sweet smoke she wants to tell themwho she wasbut the man whistles so loudlyshe forgets everythingand barks at the moon
Sharon Olds. Stag’s Leap. Knopf.
Sharon Olds’s most recent collection of poems, Stag’s Leap, winner of the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, tells the story of the breakup of the poet’s thirty-year marriage. Olds, a seasoned confessional poet whose first book, Satan Says, was published in 1980, is the first American woman to win the T. S. Eliot …
Dry Spell
La chicharra, Spanish for ‘‘cicada,’’trills with not one but two rolling r’slike the charlado who won’t stoptalking because he has too much to say. Fallen dead on the sidewalk, though,his song is hushed, a shell emptied out,carapace of silence, once a chorus,lacelike wings enfolded, mute supplicant. Shell fired in terra cotta, ashen undercarriage,pale green wing …
Creation Myth
Overgrown weeds had hidden the car untilthe brushfire revealed it. Once the doors cooled,neighborhood kids came to investigate. One rubbeda circle clear with his sleeve and clicked his glassesagainst the window. A beautiful woman layagainst the seat—black dress, sparklesaround her neck, confetti in her hair.Next to her sat a man in a tuxedo,a noisemaker stuck …
Jose Saramago. The Lives of Things. Verso Press.
Originally released in 1978 as Objecto Quase, the recently re-released The Lives of Things is an intriguing collection of short stories written by Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, perhaps Portugal’s most famous, if not most rebellious, author. While best known for his relatively recent novels The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Blindness (1995), and …
The Divine Auditor
It is still dark when my cell phone begins to buzz. When I flip it open, my mother’s voice comes through a connection often interrupted by the apartment building’s iron girders. We make some awkward small talk and then she says: “I guess you want to talk about the email you sent me last …