Articles

after “The Guest House” by Rumi The moon is nothing but a circular ghost backlit, just disappearing beyond the roofs, beneath whichan arm brushes an arm, skin sheds its light so thinly we forget we can seeAnd in our room, sleepon the brink of extinction, sheepout to pasture; their small black eyes blink night awayHow …

I Anna Votova Saves the MillAfter the fever there was no one left to pollard the graveyard elms, but at least the ground was soft.A week after our parents burned away, the men came from Bratislavato help, they said, but their faceswere the faces of wolves at winter’s end. So with the women I went …

It feels good to throw the minnows of my hands some mosquitoes of action, so the mind can go find. When you were alive, there were times I wanted to slip you something to make you sleep. I’m still ashamed of these thoughts, a cosmos of fire opal crimped in my pliers. I wanted to …

While you’re Just doin’ weekend chores with your boyfriend (or is it fiancé now?), I’m gorging again on the History Channel, trying to convince myself I might meet someone at the gym if I could just levitatefrom my sofa with the same ease and grace Chinese myths assigned to “flying dragons” some PhD (with a …

Some rooms are smaller than they are. Some rooms are larger. And some roomsDon’t exist, no matter how much We want them to. What does exist—A cup and spoon, a dog, a wish— Takes the place of what might exist.Even the breath you exhale takesThe place of the room you’ve dreamed of,And in that room …

What looked like a scalable low mountain, she said, perfect for goring with a flag or surveying the native infantry’s encampments, proved to be an anthill, of an as-yet-undocumented species, not theblack ant, not the red ant, but the brown Deccan ant, impossibly prolific and dangerous to disturb: The first explorer to set foot on …

with a phrase from Denise Levertov’s “To the Reader” I am away, and though I do not know yet that my father is dead, I wake three times when trains pass by the house in Nelson County where I am staying. It is fall, just, still time for open windows, for porch talk and stinkbugs …

I have never written about my father without saying my father is dead. My daughterwill reach the last age he reached this fall. I have doubled his time—tell me, what does that mean? There is an old joke:What do you get when you divide crumbs? More crumbs. What is timebut time, evanescent, air, frail hummingbird …

seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little —Joan Retallack poem for the next ice agepoem where no one wears black to the funeral(s)poem for the fact that weather does not ask permission to touch youpoem using specific names for all the people we’ve known who have died before turning twenty-onepoem watching you …

First: fervor for swampland / then hospital socks / Gessoed floors / like planets of milk— / he is dreaming of swimming / and running / at once / He is endlessly / about to / Sometimes predreams / are the wildfires in Georgia that year / the pond cypress / & bladderwort / aspirin-white …