1 At the window, last night’s words, ashen Against the glass Black petals in the vase, delicate As[…]
Miss Dolly Bumfrey We bear Muscat To your sick by traction. Making headway at that driving test Was[…]
Rae Armantrout: I put a glose on you Habitat-themed enclosure. Zen-inflected mug. Around the block dogs bark at[…]
How I Like My Women I like my women slight and frail, bones hollowly light, ribcages pressed like prison[…]
you ask me how I occupy myself in my dreams well, if I see one I see the[…]
The Forsythia in Bloom Suddenly in the early spring evening the forsythia bush is aflame with light, a[…]
Milton’s Well Predestination stopped her on the road, speeding in some overcommitment, racing impetuous down green skylines, pushing[…]
For Fred (Veteran’s Day, November 11th, 2004) We miss you, Mr. Rodgers. You told us straight. You were[…]
1. I will say our secret… a stone holding its own weight we were lovers holding each other[…]
By Jupiter! By Bacchus!: Against Humility In the black ooze of the sky, where golden spangling stars[…]
Pieta, Detroit He’d been dead an hour when she came, Ambulance waiting, no hurry now. Her oldest boy.[…]
Daylilies At Night Lilies which open half-sullen pods in the night As if lightning bugs, the torso’s involuntary[…]
Not Black & White Joey was swimming in Sulphur Creek, mother can tell because his eyes are yellow,[…]
Advent (The Song of Aldan) I stand with the trees, as they wait for the rain. I dance[…]
The Midal Charm In a white canoe The river takes her home Tired and alone With her[…]
Where The Land Moves On Forever 1. Siringitu, the Maasai named it, the sepia expanse of grassland, and[…]
Mis En Scène: A Wet Season The graceless way in which you wooed me positions itself, transfigures[…]
Memento Fr. 1 Aotearoa is the savage place, seeding A heap of broken images, mixing Mortuary photos with[…]
The Dead Zone North from Kiev, empty roads The light of other summers opens among the[…]
i. Picture Seville, prudent with orange-groves. The sun plays like a gnossienne beneath the trees, a tormented harlequin[…]
Bob can play a number of instruments, none of them well. He likes his guitar, an Ovation with[…]
Now, this was not one of those cases in which a pig is killed in sacrifice and[…]
Eight Months On Time, tidewater near, headlong has ripened you to this glowing fullness, clumsy in dormant love.[…]
1. The End I went home—after three hungry years, a dozen awful addresses, and too many leftover 60s[…]
Venerable Xoratio Rey is now very ill and there is no hope he will be able to live[…]
Rush hour was over but traffic in the city was still bad. The long summer days kept the[…]
It didn’t announce itself, the difference in the room, but it was there, of that he was positive.[…]
Abbott, West Virginia, the town with a funny name, was a funny place to live. Needing somewhere to[…]
Shards of sunlight flickered off the car’s bumper as it disappeared over a rise in the road. Josh[…]
It was the penultimate day of the working week, after the English fashion. Dominguinho was glancing through the[…]
Karel Dibcek woke up and thought for a moment that he was still in Prague. He lay warm[…]
Thirty-five years before he died, a man with straight and thick but graying hair hurried down the worn[…]
Portents were in the air. First, to be given a shilling was remarkable. We were both handed a[…]
I More excited than she’d ever been before, Ankbanatacha rushed into her parents’ bedroom — feeling indulged as[…]
In this first summer night in the year of the itch, I watch the rain clouds collide[…]
“What kind of a name is Moses O’Reilly?” said Joe Babylon. I didn’t answer him because I was[…]
Cotton Barbeau thought of himself as both lucky and damn smart. He was called Cotton by everyone who[…]
I felt an irritation on my right shoulder and tapped my skin. Something awoke in me. A new[…]
Third day out, the oddest feeling overtook me. A hybrid of nostalgia and deja-vu, this fuzzy childhood sense-memory[…]
The note, if one word could be referred to as such, was on eggshell-blue stationery, and had come[…]
Christian Gimel was killed by a falling stand-up piano on the day The Dyke was painting the staircase[…]
“Aren’t we quaint — sitting around this stage prop of a country store with a leaky pickle barrel[…]
The day of, I find my husband in her room, kneeling in front of her bed. It is[…]
September 1, 1970 ImageI have lived here for the past fifteen years eight of them alone save for[…]
Each morning she stood on the bank casting her line into the water and reeling it in slowly[…]
Dear A, I’ll keep adding to this as I go along. Maybe by the time I finish it,[…]
The October edition of POETRY featured an annoying sequence of petulances entitled, collectively, “Antagonisms,” none more excruciating than earnest Eavan Boland’s cautious,[…]
Almost 10 years have passed and Jean-Bertrand Aristide has failed to improve the lot of the Haitian people[…]
the trembling that day in iran you weighed a honeydew’s weight when you first took thick milk from[…]
TO SIDNEY’S DEFENSE The erected wit with its complete set of screws and mock I-beams and moist whimsy[…]
i. her, one perspective, is secular and simple with blue plastic eyes and split thumbprints. and, in a word[…]
A PACIFIC VAGRANT And so, in travel, I made my mind treasonable in every way, In treason to[…]
TWAS it was was a translucid partition between the consciousness here below: forfeiting all things-light she goes back[…]
Map of America trace the pacific coast with your hand feel the moisture on your fingertips crossing the[…]
We’d recommend them to anyone— As nice, but pricy (which is a lie)— Took our breakfast on the[…]
Beyond St Catherine’s Hill, the long chalice of river sluices through the city, canals Romans cut dividing the[…]
Through habit, and for no other reason, they sat in a ring, each observer and observed. It was[…]
A child-slave’s blood washes the feet of the black prince in the mute heart of Africa. The prince[…]
Here I was, forty-five years later, coming back to Saugus, looking to find something I had lost. Though[…]
Love in White Lucía blew out the eighteen candles of her white birthday cake in one go. She[…]
A Sentence in Transposition Cuban-American Style in Harlem a storefront restaurant pouring into a street a mélange of[…]
The first time I saw him was in our shift room. We were coming in mornings—early mornings. The[…]
“I want us to ride over to Aeria,” decided Mr. Bell early on the morning of the bank[…]
Not long ago, when his parents were alive and his sister didn’t have to live in a trailer[…]
He’d wound up pretty well and delivered a hell of a punch. It hurt a lot and I[…]
No one who lived in the East Village during the 1960s can forget the foetid smell in the[…]
All the itinerant shadows of a man’s quiet hope dissected and his guts laid open for the crows.[…]