I Your good-bye is a warning:watch the horizon or you’ll miss my return. It’s a worm in the belly of a kelp-tangled gull, sea lions sparking from rocks, houndssent to hunt you down& bring me home; it’s white sailsswelling, my breasts in your palms. I wake to an empty shore. II By summer’s end, all …
translated by dan beachy-quick XLIV The stranger had a wound he couldn’t see—you knew him by his breast’s troubled breath. When he drankhis third cup he knew himself again: those roses he wore as a crown shed all their petals on the ground.Someone scorched him badly. I swear, gods, the image I sing dances true: …
translated by dan beachy-quick Fragment 89 They are sleeping, mountain-heads, headlands, and the gullies too—the fallen leaves and the tribe of slow-footed creatures the dark earth grows—beasts of prey mountain-bred and brood of wild bees and the brutemonsters deep in the deep purple seas:and that flock of omen-giving birds long-winged, they are sleeping too.
Good evening, everybody. Before we begin our tour, please take a moment to make sure your seat belts are securely fastened. If you’re traveling with children, please double-check their seat belts or hold them securely in your laps. Though the animals are secure in their habitats, we do ask that you remain seated at all …
(The theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly by Ennio Morricone plays in its entirety as a Roomba wearing a cowboy hat enters the stage. The full song plays out with lighting effects dramatically proclaiming the Cowboy’s entrance. He is amazing, this cowboy. Once a different western song comes on, the Cowboy speaks.) …
Americana While my son and I build with blocks in the playroom, YouTube becomes our jukebox, time machine, history lesson, giving us Jean Ritchie, Odetta, songs its autoplay chooses, Vera Hall singing about a man who runs, a man in chains, a man who gets killed. Boil Vera worked as a cook and washerwoman in …
My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were …
Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough. —Robin Wall Kimmerer Every year around this time, a small frog shows up in my mother’s garden. A Pacific tree frog, also known as a “chorus frog,” with a bright-green body iridescent against sprigs of wild lilac or browned petals of …
Joining a yoga studio forced me to think about breathing. I’m conflicted as I kneel on my mat waiting for class to begin. Despite breathing being essential to staying alive, I’ve always worried about bad breath. Worse is the worry of losing your breath entirely and not being able to draw it back. The worst …
The thing about guilt: it’s so unattractive and I’m so good at it. And I’m thinking: How can I read the poems without buying the book online because the book’s being sold by a third party and my old boyfriend will address the envelope to me, no doubt, because he’s the third party. I also …