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 …
Each summer I plunge my hands deep into sand, scrape knuckles against millennia of rock, dig untilI feel against my palm the wriggling that means success. I don’t shriek or flinch. I’m skilledat the capture, the catch and cradle, then in my palm the prize: pink-gray carapace,eyestalks like tendrils, ten white legs frantic for the …
for Caro We have a bag of bones in the back seat: cradle of sacrum, blood-tinged spine. You gathered them from the scorched grass at Mosquito Creek. Held them to your chestwithout tenderness, the way we held onto resentments the August we became friends— our misplaced devotion to love gone bad.I thought I smelled lingering …
This is a love poem.First, you place your hands on the door. Phantosmia is the smell of something not there Wrong: first, she closes the door before bed, so that should you wake in the night and smell smoke,you may place your hands on the door in order to feel for and determine the intensity …
One morning I woke up and you were gone but I didn’t know it yet. Someone was cuttingyou down while someone else filmed a video of itthat they posted on the internet. I was eating breakfast with my kids. I wasn’t thinking of you.Even then you would have called me stupid, called this poem stupid, …
fills the ditchwith IV bags, slashed weather balloons, cracked screenglass. Hint: thisis about the unacknowledged inconvenience of convenience.The field seems different.Its butterflies have been corralledto study the nanotech secrets of their wings, its geckos boxed and shippedto teach robots to climb walls.A carp nudges sludgeagainst a berm under the bridge, not worldbuilding fast enough,just squeezing …
He rarely spoke of the past and when he did, it wasin flashes—the Norwegian girl from ESL classes those firstAmerican years, how she scared them all riding horses bare-back, eating apples whole: seeds, stem, core. The Japaneseboy serenading the class about sake. The firstCoca-Cola he drank in the new country. How in Koreahe buried their …
“In that particular case, the girl wasn’t mature enough to understand what was going on.” —Bernardo Bertolucci in a 2011 interview, responding to a question about Maria Schneider’s experience being assaulted on the set of Last Tango in Paris while filming a rape scene I lived with a manwho liked for me to come to …