If you get five out of six numbers correct in the lottery, you’re still a loser. –Fred Espenak, “Mr. Eclipse” 88% is a lot, nearly the whole xxxxthing. The black moon sliding over the sun like a manhole xxxxcover, a … Continued
The lamp in the borrowed room said, “This Is It!” We meant otherwise, and the room said no this is it. There are ways to code intensity on the brain like a map, like the lamp placed in the kiln, … Continued
Praise for this wending, this bearing beginning. The least stuck is groaning, the most has given in. Words a rotted barn, full of must and straw and animals sleeping. I want to dream with you the mountainsides, the beaches, the … Continued
A wooded, bloodied word, a dozing black daisy. Into you out of my head how many times, out of air and earthward, bird with no throat, bird unopened. Unencumbered of my desire, your arms free of the frozen stream. To … Continued
Pretty good work if you can get it, making paradises in abandoned banks stony exterior, marble interior, the registers like a failed carillon (toneless) striking all hours at all hours. Every noon the ghost attendants ghost-walk up to the kiosk, … Continued
Out of a tin-cold, murmuring black wood Lightly you lope, pale deer, lifting A story from pages of snow Nothing turns in your eye they say Toward the tin-cold and murmuring black wood I bear a display case of blue … Continued
This is Polynesia in the mitten, hidden past the trailers where iron sky meets iron water. We tread beaches like two lovers tread the bedroom, moving slowly toward a point … Continued
No one could tell us how we ended up here. The definition of glass is obvious. It’s glass. And we were‚ like‚ right inside it. A glass arm that had our arms inside. A glass hip. Glass pupils to keep … Continued
Look, up in the sky! Look what the culture is thinking of itself! Two orphans are up against it, ladies and gentlemen. And aren’t we all orphans in some way? Aren’t we all adopted? The illegal alien falls to earth … Continued
The family two docks down, their chatter straining over the talk radio blaring, in-laws, who never had kids, warning relative’s kids, “Too close, kids.” Me on my dock thinking No kids, so that’s the reason the kids are too close, but no breaks. The in-laws: “Stop it. Stop horsing around.” “Oh, go ahead, fall … Continued
for Tom Devaney On the eve of never forgetting I still want to run away from you together or not run but bite or register bionic judgment always … Continued
I. In March, in fifty degree weather, my friend convinces me to walk out across a frozen pond. He slams a log into it to show me it’s safe. He wants my help grabbing an old hockey puck. I … Continued
In the minute it took to fetch the blue bowl from the kitchen to pick the just-ripe cherries, the blackbirds had come. They picked the branches clean, ascending into their own blue bowl. Lacking wings, I look for meaning. We … Continued
Translated by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani My father’s bookcase was divided by nationalities of the authors. “The French ones,” my mother would say with some solemnity, indicating the most considerable sector, and perhaps the one most congenial to … Continued
No nail to spark the fires, no waists to nip in. There will not be cookery or starguide, no petite or hardiness in lace, hardly an elegance. No celebrities for the TV. No dogeared books on floral arrangement or patched … Continued
I’ve known little bitches like her all my life, their noses and butts stuck so high in the air you’d think St. Peter himself had goosed her. Haven’t I seen her mooning after the fathers like a kitten wanting nothing … Continued
Growing up black white trash it’s not that you Are and you never think you are Part of the home you go back home to Twenty years later and two thousand miles Lord just to look at it … Continued
—MILTON KESSLER What if California wasn’t the end of possibility? Gleaming out past Alcatraz and Coronado— someplace real to reach, if only you could walk across the water. Forget Manifest Destiny. What is ever manifest? What is destined? Today … Continued
Translated from French by Andrew S. Nicholson listen up earthen colors too late your laughter eats the sun for rabbits for chameleons grasp my body between two long lines when famine becomes light sleep sleep we feel so heavy blue … Continued
Translated from Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval Leave leave me to do it she says and when she leans down when she goes to drown her face gently in the coarse hair in the dark marbled tangle over skin so … Continued