Excerpts
Madness Is Remembering
First, he reminded you of Eros in the cave. In Paris, you saw Canova’s sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss shortly before you met him, and when you invited him into your bed, you saw his naked form and remembered the statue, and named him Love: delicate, yet masculine, waif-like but sure as the white …
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 …
If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems edited by James Lenfestey, University of Minnesota Press
If Bees Are Few is an anthology spanning 2,500 years "from Sappho to Sherman Alexie," as its cover copy suggests. Edited by James Lenfestey, it is as eclectic in its selection as it is vast in its time frame. The book takes its title from Emily Dickinson, who was herself fascinated with bees, and comes …
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 …
Sublime Physick by Patrick Madden, University of Nebraska Press.
In just one page of one essay in Patrick Madden’s new collection Sublime Physick, the author chisels away at a block quote of Nietzsche, lines from Dante as translated by Longfellow, a verse from the Psalms, and a remark from Solon, the Greek reformer who reprimands Croesus in book one of Herodotus’s Histories. A few …
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 …
Corzo
One day when I was in the seventh grade, I came home to my father—Eduvigo Herrera III—cutting his heart out with a steak knife. He was sitting at the little kitchen table when I got home from school, his hand in a ragged chest wound the size of a plum. "Mija, I need you to …