You have to say Here! as loud as you can so your teacher knows that you’re here.You can hide anywhere. The only rule is bestill and quiet until the teacher calls your name. “Is everyone quiet?” I ask my daughter.“Sometimes,” she says. I want to knowthe names of the loud children, the ones who might …
It would be easier to be kind if we knewWe were members of an ensemble that’s destined To perform the romance we’re now performing Again and again till each has actedEvery part in the plot, high and low, at least once.Easier for the king to careAbout working conditions in the palace scullery If he knew …
In truth, I wish my birthstone was any other green—a granite oval furred with moss, flint effaced by lichen: each proof of water.What does a peridot prove? My birth was in a sea of sweat. My mother, milkless, fevered dry by August heat. I drank water and dwindled—ribs withering.When I didn’t cry, I coughed. As …
I did not come to curse this plot of earth, brickwork bounce-house stricken with resting bitch face, or its Pandora’s box of kid-feet, continually thunderingback and forth on the fourth floor. Dear long-emptied birdfeeder,ghost, and broken screen, this season’s token cliffhanger requires I pack my things and disperse into a cold front of engine rips …
Whose words are these,refusals astonishing my tongue like broken teeth,how many have I swallowed bad days, allowing the condemned gas station up the block to be labeled baggage, the way I have my debt-collection phone calls, or divorce,or my apartment’s warping floor where figurines and diaper boxes idle?A sprawl this extensive breeds empty pockets, and …
backdrops isn’t exactly what that Elder ever claimed to love, but the wanting at the heart ofevery want, this seeingthe Dreamtime flow, change course, drought up, stop at who-damned-the-river. Oh crucialterrifying eternal spots blotted out where the winding water nowhits land out of reach where women gave birth for so long,daughters and sons come to …
Artist’s Statement My primary interests include traditional folk-art forms, the politics of war, and artificial intelligence, as well as its implications within modern warfare. Drone series is inspired by my visit to Pakistan in 2011, and it involves two distinct yet contrasting visual elements: colorful and bright symbols and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aka drones. …
My friend Don told me about how his mother passed into death. A tough Italian American, strict and scolding, she became pliable as she neared her end. She gentled and gave up all her fights. Don, her primary caregiver, was there when the death rattle came to her throat. “You can go now,” he said …
Cradle Catholic. Spicy chrism, baptism, incense, First Communion in a white dress, black burned palm fronds crunching across my forehead as the priest drew the Ash Wednesday cross. Belief was my heritage, passed down from immigrant grandmothers who kept cauldrons of chicken blood simmering on the stove. Rituals, saints, gore. Jesus bleeding openly, his eyes …
I remember that summer before junior year, how Catherine and I lay side by side on a grassy knoll in downtown Charlottesville, watching the Fourth of July fireworks, whispering between booms. Children of rural suburbs, we felt stranded, too far from downtown to get mixed up in the college-kid mayhem and not deep enough in …