When the birds’ names doubled with words that summonedideas from their hiding places (the flicker, the chat, the swift, the lark),I watched them more closely, confident that somewhere a thought would escape the bird, buoyed upon a pun, and I’d find meaning in a world that glidedabove me, dipping hardly into my mind.When I saw …
I tell my father about the mnemonic techniques of Greek and Roman orators—They’d construct palaces in their minds, affixing—to this archway, to that dome—portions of speeches they hopedto remember.He needs a trick to remind himmy mom has started chemotherapy.This is why she looks pale right now. This is why her hair is falling out.I need …
In the beginning, the gesture occurs without a thought:I reach for the word you can’t grasp and pass it to you like a bowl filled with rice.You spoon the rice onto your plate and pass back the empty bowl.At this point,the rounded space the bowl surrounds is not an image of loss.
imagine you without you. imagine lopping off your fingers with a jigsaw, distracted by the gunfire and church bellsof a Hells Angels funeral.here, see the market at Chapultepec, the tortas ahogadas, the chapulines, the hundreds of Virgens de Guadalupe painted onto tiles meant for gardens and labyrinthsand kitchens, the dozens of copies of Mein Kampf.Coyote …
for the nun Ryōnen Gensō (1646–1711)Years until you take the tonsure, years until I learn to learn, and I can’t stand to sit inside the crawl space of this wordso I’ll turn it to a window, open it to you, pretend it’s different when you speak it—just the tree, a murmuring eternity,I’ll believe our living …
Star Lake, July 2003It happened overnight, like waking to the first snow: each tree branch bowing under sudden weight, covered, every inch, in caterpillars. They wormedaround by the hundreds. Rocks appeared to vibrate, bark looked to be swimming in algae. My cousins & I spent the day sawing their fuzzy bodies in half,just to make …
Of course, it’s empty now, the library, besides glass blown from window frames, books warped & torn over years of weather bursting into the dark building. Doom & I release handslike we always do when taking stock of a new place, or an old one made new by storms, as we step through one of …
One season my stomach shrank from staying in bed for months so hungry. When bears hibernate,their bodies recycle to stay alive: reabsorbing urine, feces, like a dream each night.In those winter days,my stronger self receded into that hole we all fear.Dirt from every angle. No one thinks so, but bears do wake in that shadowed …
For JoJo, after “Feel Alright” I watch a couple braid their hands on the A train; not sure if they gripped each other so tightly because of the fearof the pretty human sitting next to them. This city lacks the space for me to yell or sing at my loudest shrill when I am lonely. …
. . . then stopped dead, the sentence waning like a tooth in the milk—. Or instead foreordained into a cavern tangential as a root in its silt-silken bed of underdark. That the shark looks like it survived extinction. Long division. Other deprivations. Cracking my neck, my knuckles, ships in bottles. Ancestry dot com, Old …