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ACROSTIC IN WHICH I CONTINUE TO SAY GOODBYE

September 19, 2024
Maybe you are with my mother, or yours,Able to look down at the roundUmbrellas lined up on Hollywood BeachRemembering the drum circle, the way the full moonEmbroidered the ocean. Is it day orEvening where you are? Do you care anymore toNegotiate time, its nonlinear Sequencing like a collage? Here onEarth it’s even more dire than...

POEM IN WHICH I’M EMBARRASSED

September 19, 2024
Some days I feel embarrassed and ashamed—a grown womanmaking her living playing with words, solving anagrams for fun. Bill Knott said the world needs more poets, not more soldiers— and yes, the world needs creation not killing, imaginationnot destruction. But I could be planting a garden, sewingup a wound, or making baby clothes for someone who...

A Study of Horses

September 19, 2024
            Once, I turned catching the light of a late afternoon through the maples—coin tossed to the dying grasses and late summer clay and nothing else. A little ways up the road, the Seventh Day Adventists sold oranges and because I didn’t have any money I pulled over to watch a horse I’d passed by...

Desire Lines

September 19, 2024
I. STATUS QUO A guy once told me                that if I could define the stakes more clearly then I might really have something in these pages about my little miscarriage. II. CALL TO ACTION If I could clarifythe inciting incidenthe might find his footing       in a narrative structure.He could trace desire,recognize change,interpret what on Earthmotivates...

POEM IN WHICH I LOSE TRACK OF TIME

September 19, 2024
First gone is the year I was born—was in 1961or 1691? My analog clock melts, Dalí-style,and my calendar pages fold themselves into origami.I show up to the dentist on Christmas and bastea turkey on the 4th of July. What’s in style?Should I wear my go-go boots or Uggs?My pillbox hat or disco rainbow wig? I’m...

The Odor of Money and Abduction in the Labyrinth of the Night

September 19, 2024
The air smelled like the flavor of metal. Brake fluid burning but clean. Something so far off as to befamiliar. “I want to believe” but I can’t afford to eatin airports. The ad implies there is an edge to the universe. It arrived when I was eight. Moved through the melted sagebrush and pine needles,...

JFK Flight Delay

August 27, 2024
visibility is alkaseltzer in a foaming glass. snowfall reaches around slowly cinchingup its buttons. drips of milk,nipple-latched earth, hungryfor something not itselfthat comes from somewhere else.your body smells of arrivals and departuresthough you stayed the whole night the same place.from your hotel room last night, reaching for it—asking for—beyond bodily pains and croissants.a sign of you. swallowing...

Night in the English Village

August 27, 2024
translated by Khaled Mattawa We, people from villages, know the night:The date palms seal our mirrors.No palm fronds swaying in the distance.Or flopping swordfish that wandered to our stream.We scamper to our mothers,close our eyelids in the bliss of warmth.A lullaby takes ustoward what appears like Hijazand Najd.Only then,we are who we are. Has the...

Paradise of the First Buffaloes

August 27, 2024
translated by Khaled Mattawa If only this country, that was once waterwould return to what it was: water. What to say for myself now that time has pushed me to the edge,now that the covenant has broken. Baghdad is a prison,Basra stricken with cancer,Al-Qaeda in Mosul. What brings water and fire together?What brings clay to...

The Old Me

August 27, 2024
In its plastic case I held a SanskritBuddhist manuscript a thousandyears old. “That’s eight milliondollars,” my friend said as the elevatordoor banged open. “Be careful.”So gentle, those words, such trust as Icarried it down the dark hall—onlythe professor who lives with his hot platein office 408 has used this buildingthe past eighteen months—and I think...

Holy Mother

August 27, 2024
“We are preaching about the Holy Mother,”the boy says to me, in English now. I admitfeeling interest—really? holy mother?—butwhen he says, “Do you have time?Three minutes?” I reconsider.I know what “three minutes” meanswhen it comes to proselytizing on the street.I picture myself, a half hour from now,drowning in the words I don’t know—I tried, actually,...

What Do You See in My Face?

August 27, 2024
I don’t know the names of trees.I never know. I’ve never known.It’s a burden to knowand another burden to not know. He says don’t attack her.It’s a dog he’s speaking to, about me.Another person stares. I have no beinghere. I am old. Are they checking to see if I look old? “Perfect,”he says on the...