“She is brown,” I said to you, less in annoyance than wonder when she flew past us with a certain flamboyance not over but under our gate to settle down into the tree beside her mate. “But he is black,” you replied, “and the name is his.” “As it always is,” I poked. “I was…
In that instant, dear daughter, when they flashed like cupid’s arrow through the current of saltwater where you splashed, more narrow and more terse than any gleam, I thought I felt within my gut love’s old curse entering the dream — that through no fault of yours but beauty, fresh as it is fierce, you…
A ladybird, or ladybug (call it what you will) has crept onto my pillowcase — this one so small it can hardly be seen. Except I do see it; it is marking the place where I slept like a bloodstain. You shrug, tell me it’s good luck, give our duvet a perfunctory sweep. But I…
after Petrarch In August, out on the veranda, it is not uncommon for a moth to fly into the light and singe its wings to dust. The lantern is so beautiful — it must. I used to watch them burn and wonder why, before I came to understand the bit about desire, how there’s no…
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Elizabeth Bishop You know everything will come to an end: the sugar, the tea, the dried sage, the water. Just go to the market and restock. Even your shadow will abandon you when there is no light. So just keep things that require only you: the book…
I wish I had a rescue plane to fly over Gaza to drop wheat flour and tea bags, tomatoes and cucumbers, to remove the rubble of the houses, to retrieve the corpses of my loved ones. I wish for a second rescue plane to drop flowers for children— the ones still alive—to plant on the…
Under the rubble, her body has remained for days and days. When the war ends, we try to remove the rubble, stone after stone. We only find a bone from her body. It is a bone from her arm. Right or left, it does not matter as long as we cannot find the henna from…
After Bob Kaufman The ceiling of my bedroom, my fridge and the stale bread in it, the notebook inside which I hid the love letters from my wife before we married, the foreign coins in my piggy bank , my expired debit cards and my brother’s death certificate, the pieces of shrapnel on or near…
I’m howling, howling in Cairo. I jump off my chair. I hug the closest thing to me, the gray corner of my room, my head glued to it like a stamp so eager to travel. Books on the shelf, they listen to the whispers of my nose as it smells the old paint, as it…
So the word for Did you know her You may be thinking Are you thinking Of someone else The red oak survives Life in the city Feng is wind in Chinese Sirocco wind Over the Sahara A wind off the dessert Burdened Memory now sand A lost ring Buried there Bells In European towers Sound…
Aren’t we all, all of us? Coming from a world before time and dream, a place without time a place that does not exist into a world that does, of time and content. The clock starts with a slap, breath, an intake of our air, the colors of this world and first dreams of what’s…
You were dreaming again, of holding her in the failing light of some failing stop over or another, some merely broken down town with nothing operative but corruption. The sun like a cavity filling with blood on the western horizon made the ocean Pacific, the late afternoon dangerous in its willingness to reveal. Were you…
