after Tanya Donelly I’ve left that driveway so many times. And I tried to rest my anger there, chewed hard at your home, cracked my teeth. You planted those teeth like tulips before the first frost. I cried when the blast came and ate what grew in spring, stopped calling home. It’s not that healing …
Summer Assistant Editor Arah Ko: How much do small interactions shape our lives? In Che’s poem, a brief brush with a coffee shop barista becomes a portal through which we can ponder distance and proximity. The poem asks the devastating question, “How many times have I mistaken closeness / for love?” The physical nearness of …
Life begins by turning around itself.The supple tenor of snailshell whorls depends: Life also ends by turning around itself.The Garden Snail wears its home around its slimy body. Lips of worshippers wearaway the sculpted straps of the saint’s bronze shoe. Wherever they journey, peregrine Garden Snails are everlastingly at home. Attunementtransits from beauty’s form to …
Passing travelers, having searched for a dinner with local character, end up at Red Lobster.They know this isn’t Boston, Chicago, or LA, but couldn’t there be a diner, pizzeria, or caféthat exudes terroir, even dilute, even abject? Most locations aspire only to be the objectsof prepositions. North of which. From which. Out of which. Beyond …
On this day, during some tough year, I was born from simple soil.Red clay. Ocher dust. No forefather. Only my overworked mother named me.I was found in a basket of wild grasses. My vine and tuber secretive, curling.I, this yam, wish to remain whole. I, severed root.Find me, this severed root, waiting not for hand …
I dropped into my father’s casketa faded photoin which he stood on a beach, ankle deepin an ocean wave, lifting a child.He swung me high into morning.My bucket hat flew from my head,landing in a moat circling a fortressmolded from sand and store-boughtconch shells.His powdered face at restless beautiful than his surprisewhen milk for our …
February at the V&A, manuscripts of Saadi’s Gulistan; quiet rubies on a dagger. You in this poem, in that roomSomewhere on all fours lookingfor a cuff link. Tracing your back; a stairwell of looselight—how I muddlethrough, like a dog in a coffeehouse—alert to sleep and sex, deploying wit to desiccatea zealot, plying tumblers of wine. …
A field of wheat sprouted on Beak Street, right below the elevated train tracks.Its stalks were tall and just about grazed the metal of the tracks, casting a shadow of wheat over the pavement.I liked the way the stalks stood, the look of them leaning against the wind.So I invited the field indoors, away from …
An old assassin finds himself out of jobs& is practicing dying. Every morning,he does his dishes, boils coffee, & when the sunis high, goes into a hole he dug in his backyard& stands still. In his dream, a teenage girlis writing a short story. She calls her protagonistBen, giving him a waistcoat so he can …
In a Baltimore hotel, we crouch on the floor,the thin space between two pitch-white queen beds. Mehendi stains a brownish red,I take care to touch nothing but skin. It occurs to me that this will be the first weddingI go to in America. How different this would be in the other land. There, at nine …