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Bluebells + How to Stop the Bleeding
Bluebells “The temple bell stops— but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers.” – Bashō Truth is the quiet color of the wind over the ocean, the temple on the cliffside, the oxidized bell that sweeps clean the plain. It stops the dust from building up as a patina,…
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Shoulder Strain
The golden sand of a cemetery wound claws with rancor, rests its plaster-filled palms on your provident shoulders, steers you into this braided soil and, Lord, it molds you like a Scythian collar, its latch unsealed.
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I run into the red
Let’s bundle up this longing to know another / fling curtains over doors / we need more blindness. I gawk at compasses / hallucinate edged circles / stop their revelatory revolutions. A matador’s calculations are never constant / I was formulated for distance. I run into the red, and the cloth is your palm. The…
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Nana para la Montaña
Cómo se enluta la montaña, Agazapada en el cándido recontar de mi nona, Cómo la pinta de cruda al tornarse cansada la luna, Cómo vacían tus calles, y callan las cunas, y cierran las puertas… al compás de la marcha. Calle que calla, Tumba que tumba, Bota que bota, al son de…
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moving/dream
two things are unique to a home: writer’s block and wetting the bed. in sleep my adult teeth pushed each other from my mouth like dominos. you held me, a wrinkled fetus with long hair– we can laugh at…
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If I Forget Thee, O Tantura
If I forget thee, O Tantura, let my right eye wither, For having witnessed the beauty of your beaches, But not the village that once stood by the sea Among pottery shards and murex shells And white lilies and sea-lavender and crimson kalaniot And little round stones sitting atop big flat stones, That my people…
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Prometheus Re-Done
Lift his body, the paramedics tell me. Hold him in your clay arms. When the firemen come, go sit among the planter pots, do not remember the shape of that char-black body bag nor the walls of that lime-white crematorium. Instead remember the stories he told you, his humid jungle and 12-count brotherhood. Tell…
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The Journey of a Ghost
I. Out of Darkness Here in the realm of shadow, in the deep darkness of a wretched chasm that never lightens, lives a ghost. Living lonely, it craves to spread this darkness, but it knows nothing of the bright world above. One day, it stumbles across a traveller exploring. It has seen men stumble into…
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Babysitting
You sleep fretfully, stirring up the buttermilk air. It’s been through your lungs and mine. You’re grasping and grasping, with hands plump and rosy. For hours you’d screamed, straining and messing my hair until exhausted. I notice us in the windowpane and let my neck slacken and chin fall forward. A mahogany…
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Still Race
A burgundy ant scampers along an iron windowsill, weaves manically around bits of old dust as if they’re skyscrapers. Dust picks up, sometimes, when the train car door opens. Makes me sneeze. Take a bite from my organic wrap – hand-packed the way my mother does it. Her mother would wrap grape leaves around loaves…
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