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…

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…

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…

  +++—after Sylvia Plath I’m a reusable canvas bag. A hotel without enough bedrooms. Winter injected in a snow globe, only water beneath its glass dome. Ivory from palms not…

  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…

  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…

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…

  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…

Noun 1. a musical instrument of the viol family Simple enough. It sleeps in its box the way a fox might sleep in a hole. 2. violin Not exactly. A…

  Your mom’s been up all night with Marlboros we bought, and their smoke snakes through her hidden closet vent to hang above your sleeping head. At dawn, I tiptoe…

I was told that one of the old gods appeared to my mother as a turkey while she planted hyacinths at her parents’ graves. He chased her out of the…

    At the Poetry Center in 1971, B.F. Skinner, founder of radical behaviorism, responded to a poem called “Verbal Behavior,” named after his book that says we should remember…