If you forget everything, remember the angle of the sun collapsingthrough beach grass we tangled up with the fates of panicked, coursingbodies that weren’t our bodies,little black forms we pretended could bea metaphor to hold in our hands: everything is so smallwhen you are trying to save the world is something you might have saidabout …
a versionAs if heaven gave eartha silent shimmering kissit can only dream of—through fields air gently movedthe moving grain and woods rustled alive unanxious in starclear night. And something like a soul(my soul?) spread tense wingsand flew through silent lands it flewas if flying home and homewere someplace stillit had never beenit had never been …
In the hotel room near Airport Way Green flowers in the bedspread Whisper to me about lossAnd the souls who have slept here.Green flowers in the bedspread, I am suddenly one with youAnd the souls who have slept here Waiting for breakfast.I am suddenly one with you:I know how it is in hell forever Waiting …
“Thirty thousand honey bees have died in three hours, falling victim to just thirty giant hornets.” —BBC Earth, “Buddha, Bees and the Giant hornet Queen” They arrive upon wings of scorched glass, carrying the scent of burrowed earth & corpses. Summer airshattering beneath their weight, the August sun casting fire from its midday throne—sister,how the …
So I fixate on the shapes we make on the glass: two stenciled cutouts against a fast-flashing scenery—light streaks lashing a lake, another lake cindering througha doily of dogwoods. In Beacon, the train slows down, the view settles into a quiet life: fishing boats cribbedin the harbor, a wind-whacked American flag repeating itself on every …
I wish you could trap sound in a jar / you can’t.*It’s not my number one wish/ it’s up there.*A noise dies / an echo stinks the corpse.*The air clears / notif the meat was a voice.*A voice clings to the bone / usually the wrong bone.*It’s not the words I’m afraid I’ll forget / …
after Faith Ringgold’s exhibit, “Black is beautiful,” at the Picasso Museum, Paris, 2023like a ribbonless plait: the rain outside descends in strands: percussive opera for the sheltered: petrichor of hominy and green: grief everywhere, all at once : and then the sun : reminds me I’m not new:they are my dowry : the gone ones …
We could tell the fire was coming toward us, coming out of the night trees, but it seemedto be moving so slowly, with such ponderous care that we doubted it would ever reach us.And I dreamed that night that I felt the heat against my skin. And it seemed that it was writingsomething or tattooing …
More and more, historyseems to me like the General Slocum, slow, wooden, paddle-wheel steamship loaded downwith one thousand three hundred and forty-two German Americans from Kleindeutschland,immigrant neighborhood on the Lower East Side. They were traveling to northern Long Islandfor a Sunday-school picnic on June 15, 1904. The steamship caught fire. Blue sky. Sun.A windy Wednesday. …
“And I Tiresias have foresuffered all…” —T. S. Eliot I prophesyreluctantly. Oedipus claimed I had no foresight. It was he who could not see.I told him the dark, stark truth. He removed Jocasta’s bronze brooch from her hanged body.With its sharpened end, he gouged out the two suns that blazed blindly across the wide skyof …