No moon. Not even a lamb to leap the gates. No shepherd with his staff curled at the top. Thy rod and thy staff no comfort. The sheep all…

  I’m a maid in this hotel, but in my country, like most women, I helped prepare the dead for burial, and I know bodies have their own light that…

  What I remember best is the bread. A whole loaf of unsliced wheat so the pastor could tear it up   in chunks to offer to you. If you…

                “When this is over I will go home and sleep forever”               —Ammar Al-Selmo   We pray for…

  Everything surprises me: that she called for me, that I am here.   What we failed at in life is done. Now she lets me grab her shoulder,  …

  The hot summer long —we loaded truck beds with   watermelons, our rough hands soothed by   the cool green rivers in their skins,   then stood guard, armed…

  Fear made us little children: If they catch you, they’ll cut off your nose and ears. If you’re a girl, they’ll rape you. So out of the cave’s bombed…

                       mistranslation after Rilke   When song arrived like an ungainly bird, the light inert, the light wide open shut, the…

                       mistranslation after Rilke   So, the king of the chipped glass departed, and all of his overgrown trinkets— the hart,…

  Many things are love, and failure         is one. And metal, and salt, and                        …

                                                           …

  for Alan Soldofky   A slick slug comes to glisten in the ear. It slides where once a wary owl would perch To scan what seemed an overlay of…