Because these times are fresh paint, fresh wax, fresh garlic. These times are new grass in the same wasteland where every spring new grass grows.
(poetry/translations)
Tag: Poetry
Nothing is so dangerous as a news report wherein Palestinians die in the passive voice, the horrific violence massaged into meaningless oblivion, the perpetrators somehow irrelevant.
Some art just makes you think instantly of the seven deadly sins. Not because they traffic in, say, lust, but because they arouse feelings in you with such painful precision that it seems some dark magic has occurred.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I hope the water of Lake Michigan knows the water of your body like kin. I hope there is soil under your nails, that the light of necessary fires burns luminous in your corneas.
Between us – a screen, a thirty-minute flight, / the friendly/ uncaring world, / car crashes, NATO drills
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I tasted only / freedom, opportunity, knew little of /
all the difficult work my body would / endure to exist here, examine patriotism.
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
in America under a big chandelier that fills my chest with ice
Blond women selling their hair injure their faces to produce
an altered shapeliness, their lips a pert woodland scene
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
how anne frank would’ve been a belieber
& ur body beneath all those clothes
the color of my skin being important
to everyone but me
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
I am longleaf pine, soybean
and cotton fields. I am not American.
(poetry)
a dandelion doesn’t remember
when it sprouted
or how it ended up
in this yard.
(poetry/translations)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Like a twig afloat on a sea of dirty towels, the feeling inside me, laid out on the countertop of my soul, filleted and sweating in the humid air. And yet, wonder eludes the twirling gearhulk of my heart.
Hawk is an everyman, a representative of everyone human. And—like Christian in John Bunyan’s moral allegory A Pilgrim’s Progress, like Dante in The Divine Comedy—Hawk is on a journey to the Godhead.
Even a Banyan tree lives longer than an emperor.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
We each take what we can / from the angels that visit us.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
It is disrespectful to sleep over the stones / of the insane without dreaming our dreams.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
as if it matters / that you drowned in freshwater, tap water, or first / in yourself.
(poetry)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Yesterday’s rosy cheeks we thought would stay. / Today our hair has turned more and still more gray.
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“I wish I could once again see / your benches where the weary come to sit / and watch their burdens bloom into butterflies.”
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“For once, I don’t want to call love a feral cat; / I want to forgive myself the way water / forgives everything.”
where were you // when you heard it / who were you with / what did it make you feel
All that’s left of the baby is the rattle. / All that’s left of the granny is her knitting.
The synagogue of my youth wandered throughout the city, from the basement of the Methodist church on the Manayunk hills to the East Falls nursing home…
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“In the end when they ask would I do it again // I’ll shake my head: where does one draft / end and another begin?”
When someone’s chasing you with a knife, / you just run, as someone said ages ago in a statement, / actually a manifesto demanding a person be face to face / with the words or they won’t count.
I might have lived a life or two / instead of counting steps in the parking lot, / between the rust-colored cars, / missing you.
I blossomed into violet / flames while my / Self, in silent flight / within my soul, / drank and sang / until dawn.
I’m paranoid, I’m chronically fatigued. / Neither Freud nor Jung can help. / Lord, grind us with your palette knife down into / the dark, into the soil.
(poetry)
Another Chicago Magazine 