Author: admin

Once we got there, we wanted to come back. You would, too. After all, have you managed lately to remember the journey is more important than the destination? Instead, we’re immediately there, the moment a place, not the space...

Even before we arrived, we knew we would return, the excuse we told ourselves, sustaining the world at the time but soft as limestone and full of holes, an entire peninsula floating as if on a cistern, an arid plain above under...

In December I have cataract surgery, clouds lifting from sun shattered eyes. The clarity of my sight an unexpected pleasure. After surgery my face is covered by a scatter shoot of age spots. Were the spots always there? A map of...

I study the sightless face of the sky even as I study my face in the mirror. Heavy plastic flesh fat to the jowls. The sky flushed at sun set marked by weather, ridden by the milky way. My face beautiful in the 1966 passport...

Mother wanted the girl upstairs to get on the scale, she said she wanted to see the high numbers she thought we were stupid, she said we could get on the scale together as if in third grade we’d never heard of subtraction....

I have a woman’s history of not being listened to, how do I begin? Do I begin with rape or do I end there? My niece said never tell me anything like that again, as if it happened to her not to me. A grown woman with three...

Clouds fling their stories against a full depth of sky writing a thousand odes to rain read in droplets. We tell our stories in bed my lips against yours until we’re sheltered in sleep. The south is convulsed by storm, the...

I never could high-kick words were my tap-shoes but I know these dancers: ecstatic routine masking terrors of keeping on spot in the line, self on the line; raw yearning, stripped, on the line those who hurt most departing stage...

(For J.D.S. — December 1978) Etched is the moment I reached for that hot-pink cleaning slip you were far too numb to see. The cortège had arrived. You were a small iron rod on cold steps, void by your side, slip stapled to...

(Irina, during the Siege) Last year I turned eighteen you know. To celebrate we boiled our cat. He was fatter than us from rats. A stew seemed right to hide what we ate. That was November, lives ago. Dawn, cold. Dusk, cold....

Yellow gaze calculating night gloom swivels past musty tracks old runs through straw the hulks of wintering harrows homes in on scrabbles takes to subzero air feathered cloud quiet as prayer what do you sense as now you settle...