When we first met, you said you hoped to write a place as yet unwritten, maybe here, the last of the café’s lunch crowd clearing out with a soft ceramic clink and spray of light through glass to glaze your dark cascade of hair. It’s not Manhattan, after all: it’s not a place for public…
The last time we ever spoke Missouri suburbs filled with snow and snowfall blotted out the oak beyond your buried patio. You’d never see another spring. Falls . . . confusion . . . vertigo . . . Familiar landmarks vanishing, you stood up from your wheelchair. Where did you think you were going? Across…
Memory care makes final introductions to residents whose names have slipped away at the slightest pressure, evanescent syllables for those who will not be here long, mere bubbles in a froth of foam, more transient than resident, some transitioning, not to another gender, but to another state of being altogether. Are you in the bathtub?…
Reconstituted voices, scraps of cloud caught in branches, the morning campfire of Pu-erh tea or mown hay of white peony, an old man’s blaser hanging on its peg, the human funk of toasted cumin seeds, oak burnt to ashes, cinerulent fox fur, crapy grape leaves in late November, a shirred old pumpkin, the soap and…
“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…
