Fieldscape
We wake in the dark. The night, wide as a horse’s maw, yawns. I want to be as silent as the trees before shaking leaves from their sides. It…
Lunar Cycle
my body sheds new life, over & double. i was told both it was sacred, it was filth— in other words godliness i do not care for. my folklore…
The Folk Songs of North America by Alan Lomax
Awake in bed I listened to my father tune up the guitar, the big, black songbook opened to any one of his dozens of favorite songs—Shortenin’ Bread, Hard Travellin’,…
Red Geraniums
My children have been excused from the table, have picked up their plates, half-nudging their chairs in with their narrow hips, and jangled their silverware all the way to…
Impression, Jardin des Tuileries
I. One morning in Paris, +++++she alighted ++++++++++on the Orangerie. Hadn’t she, as a girl, loved Monet? ++Had each jigsaw of greens +++++++and blues not cohered +++into a lily, had…
Alone in the Beinecke with Langston Hughes
From draft to draft, I see the translator’s tension headache, a grind of molars. +++++++++++Despierto entonces de mi propio +++++++++++grito, the close of Gabriela Mistral’s poem “Dormida.” +++++++++++Awaken myself with…
On Writing (after Years of Doing Anything Else)
I know that I can do it because I’ve done it before. Crafting birdhouses, I mean. When I was a kid, my mother implored me to finish my times…
From Bird to Barn Swallow
In my last moments, before I coughed my guts onto the pavement, while hot wind raked my feathers, she, all beak and awkward neck, leaned over me, craning to…
The Other Lauren
I’d just been to Goodwill ++and the recycling center when I pulled up beside the other Lauren ++returning from a run. I was feeling light, blithe with the lifted weight…
Gloria, In Excelsis
I. The last time I saw Gloria, my Jamaican grandmother, her ghosts had brought her to a New York night club. It was 3:35 pm on a twenty-first century…