Poetry

It is winter butthe poets are still coming.I once lived in atown where there were no poetsor children. The treeswere made of salt. When the windshook, nothing happenedbut daylight. There were no handssince there was nothing to take.

“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do,” my mom consoles her friend, upset about her son. Both women quit smoking, but we’ve all seen how a lit cigarette can catch like a lost fishhook hungry for flesh. Most wildfires ignite from human oversight, but you can’t blame the mother. In his garage my cousin playing with …

The Museum of Mothers is free on Fridays.I go with Rheim, who is also not a mother, though she carries around a bag of needlesshe bought years ago from an Iraqi woman everyone called Zahra. Rheim gave namesto each of their lean metallic bodies. We start in the sculpture garden, which the curatorshave named Sorry …

a golden shovel / after Against Me! All I ever wanted to be—the summerdaydreamed of. Girl in the floral-print dress& endless golden fields. I just wanted youto future me, when so many people wantme past-tensed. I know I can’t convince themI deserve survival. A future togrow up into. I know that they can’t seea girl’s …

stares down head and claw on the tableto make something whole again. Perhaps she’s unnerved by the prospect, deathback to life. But that we crave not just intact but true is the first wish as whenan old mount from the ’30s is taken out of the standard formal pose-of-that-day, itsupright-for-eternity habit of ninety years, its …

At the sentencing, a snake of painroiled inside her veins. She did notfaint or scream, or sink to the white tilethe way Alma did. She stuck her fingerin the ripped hole of her pocket’slining, she felt the inside of the woolcoat, the nowhere of material,that black hole of seam and stitch.She saw his face, blank, …

Better takeout was thriving in DeKalb County,but the school system hadn’t caught up,its languages unable to support the Greek bakery,dim-sum parlors, or lox-and-bagel shops.We knew the Roman Empire went beyond Italyand Pizza Hut was not quite Italian,but we had to distinguish Latin partiesfrom the French, Spanish, and German.Latin drew the kids who would opt for …

We tie our sisters’ red ribbons around our heads and wear the garlands of the spent cartridges as ammo. On our shoulders, we carry the rhododendron branches as rifles fitted with letter openers for bayonets. Some bring rotten potatoes to hurl as hand grenades. Because the forest is booby-trapped, we play at school. All the …

The world encouraged me to completemy doctorate in shamelessness. “You’ll hurtto not be part of all this interfaceand commerce,” I was warned, thoughas soon as I declined I was rewardedwith a loneliness so pure that my earscould not be found by bothersome words,and my blood felt fed only by the airand the light that lives …

Anyone who makes tasty food has to be a good person, because think of all the love that goes into cooking:salt and pepper, sprinkle a little extra cheese, and pop open a bottle of Syrah, or if we’re eating at my parents’ in Las Vegas,we’re drinking Tsingtao beer, my father’s favorite, and he adds more …