The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
A cloud spills grey
oil over their guns
They aim at a wolf
who, a second ago,
was someone’s son.
Category: Poetry
Someone is calling to you from the sea,
beating the heavy waves with his tired hands.
(poetry/translations)
In Kiefer’s Maine, the trucks, soon to contain slaughtered chickens, have “waiting mouths,” “the air [has] feathers”—as if all that’s left of that life is scattered to the wind. Kiefer braids losses throughout the book; it can feel as if loss, like farm grit, “filters into every soft thing.”
(reviews)
suns as yellow as ours
gleaming suns
from lives like matches
atrocious explosions
scattering ashes
like bright corollas
(translations/ poetry)
I didn’t know we lived a few counties
south from where Frederick Douglass stood
half-naked, one shirt for a whole winter.
His hands smaller than my brother’s
who took all the jokes on the school bus
(poetry)
how many egrets lost footing in the candles of your chest,
syllables broken by rust?
(poetry/ No Place is Foreign)
Man’s resentment at her for being torn in half, forced to share his Maker’s image but not enough to spare. He wept petitions in the lap of Tigris and Euphrates, “Please, please!” he moaned, “She’s too singular to be understood!”
(poetry)
My mother insisted
til the day she died
that I was born at a very early age
I still don’t know if I believe that
(poetry)
The song might be the length it took for a historic city to be destroyed (twenty-two minutes) one February evening.
Who collects the snow globes of war and of fathers?
A collection of snow globes, each says “it is snowing.”
(poetry)
if the Earth would just split in two
& one half would take its leave
I’d take a seat on the other half
& absorb the blue skies above
(translations/poetry)
