Poetry

The velvet ant is not velvet, not ant. It is a wasp, grooved with sting. If scooped into the muzzle of a lizard, the velvet ant (not velvet, not ant) jackhammers. Its whole body is ammunition. They call it cow killer. Yet it is beautiful, too: encased in orange & white thistle. Spotted red & …

My sisters and I swathe down to anklesin plain shalwars and row up like duckpins in the backseat. Every pilgrimage resembles the other. The car belts down the freeway, breaches past the occasional tamarisksthat flash along the corridor unreeling barren mountains. Mother winds the radio down to mute—against the ungodlinessof stringed instruments my ears strainfor …

We had bananas that bore no fruit, an old macaw stooped on a weathered cross, and a blackberry tree that grew next to a wall crowned with broken bottles. The Andes foothills crumbled on a gravel path;the desert sun broke through the cloak of winter.I must have been eight or nine when I climbed that …

In the right light my mind recalls its own wildness cascading into fresh view.The wildness of damp East German rain, slugs big as fingers clinging to the street.In the Rorschachs of mold blooming across my curtains in Japan.In the country stream piloting its own froth down the mountains and out to sea.In the pond I …

From where, the first night, did you arrive? With the dusk? The smell of sleek meats, the maggot growth below the plastic,perforated lid? The second night,the dogs barked earlier. The tree line shivered with thick stink. Dad taped a flashlightto his Glock. When you stood at the yard’s edge, Mom slipped on the porch steps.What …

“Don’t date a lot of boys. It’s better far to marryyour first love, like I did,” the gray-haired woman said. The teen girl scoffed at this advice; she longed to carryout what she thought to be a full life, rich with varied experience, like in the novels she had read.And so she dated many boys …

You sometimes think you suffer from Capgras.Sea turtles, without thinking too much about it, feed on seagrass.Capgras syndrome is a psychiatric condition wherein the afflicted cannot be dissuaded from the horror-inducing belief that her friends and family are, in fact, impostors wearing close-fitting skin suits and uncannily lifelike human masks.Seagrass is a vegetation common to …

There must be escalators somewhere, because, honestly, what on earth could not be seen as practical?Mathematically scarred bits of solidity rise like a heartbeat into view, then vanish into their own mechanics.These devices are doing a great service to people desirous of movement, a feeling one often has at bluest noon when day pinions the …

Eventually, the pigeons lacerated the smog cover into an alphabet.And so I listed to the best of my ability all the collective nouns for birds I knew:murder to unkindness.Snipping circles around the outer regions of your whatslike only a Berliner can, you clipped a smatteringof syllables from your vocabulary’s newsprint. I watched them murmurate like …