Summer. Bridgeport Park.
There are two. Jill, my pelo chino pup & Sam,
a user-friendly pug. A perfect mix of rug
& hearth, innocent/not yet marked. There are
no boundaries. Downhill, a man, grey hair
stretching towards his ass asks about the
On the other side of the ocean
I’ve seen a tree like this before
She is singing in your room
Where was it?
The song:
We’re in homeroom, and Jessica St. Clair and Her Bossy Brigade got it all wrong. I am not “livin’ in a car.”
For example, today. After school, I go to the library, do my homework on a computer. Print it out then browse for graphic novels before walking to State Street. Duck into Fairchild Coffee for a hot cocoa. That’s where I eat the ham and cheese sandwich from Decca’s lunch. Decca gives me her sandwiches when she’s on her gummy diet.
Air-conditioning, bless
borscht, bougainvillea, breeze block candelabra aloe, cabazon
dinosaurs (there’s Desert Shit embroidered on your new cap)
electrolytes and eye drops (two truths no lies)
Somewhere on the genome was a gene for cowlick, and that would be her first choice for gene therapy, just edit it out. Marcy sketched a double helix next to the cartoon she was working on and expanded it into a pouty face with the helix for a nose and the words gene and therapy as loopy earrings. She added a cowlick and was drawing an eye when she snapped the lead off her pencil. “Oh shit.”
“Swear jar.” Her son, Bruce, didn’t look up from playing with her calculator.
I always thought I’d die a cinematic death,
splayed on a vast expanse of fresh snowfall
that glints back a million stars of sunlight
while a thin trickle of blood blossoms and spreads
like the folds of my red, velvet skirt.
I wish I’d kept more to myself
rather than laying it all out
on whatever surface was offered
like if I could just show you,
if I could just explain—
Lana had long been in the habit of reading Terry’s mail, particularly at Christmas when the cards came. She never made a secret of it, and he never complained, even when he found the envelopes slit along their pale white throats, splayed like rash feathers against the green felt of his desk. Terry didn’t like to be bothered with details—bank statements, charity requests, formal correspondence. He trusted Lana, in fact, to take care of all such customaries, all but the sentimental things, for which no particular action was required. If the envelope was empty, a small sigh invariably escaped his lips. Done! he thought, satisfied, as though he had done it himself, and tossed the thin, paper sheaf into the drawer.
I speak no Arabic, only a bit of French. They speak no English.
We crowd into the small bathroom to wait for a toilet, two young women before me, coiffed and polished, their eyes lined black with a calligrapher’s precision. Soft lashes, velvety blush, and foundation blended with an artist’s hand. Hijabs pinned and draped just so. Layers of beaded satin flow around their slight frames, one indigo, the other violet. Lips stained rose. Eyes like a fawn’s.
around here there’s talk of ‘the big one’
not as in if but when the waves at last
are thrown from their shore’s caress
by earth-shatter only to come crashing
back, regurgitative, clearing miles of coast
Who named you “Khadija?”
When Jason tried to spell out your name,
he choked on the first letter
and could only finish the rest with backslaps.
Mustafa was too scared.
Said your name was a swarm of drones.
I turned twenty-five and it was summer.
I thought my vocabulary
for death had stopped growing
but it bloomed a deluge of honeysuckles
in my room. The war we had
thought would end, did not end.
The ilium is the largest bone in the pelvic girdle.
Its crest is what my lover holds
sometimes like a steering wheel
patiently pushing pleasure forward.
When I wear a tight belt around my
waist my mother sees what all my lovers
do.
My soul is tied up to an old column.
I recall, in the slumber of the night,
its stone history.
I run my hand over the fossilisation of time
on its cold body.
My hand collides with its protrusions.
He hears of war and inflation
speculation and high prices
The world shattered like a pomegranate
its grains blood-red
This pain isn’t us,
Always mine, and never yours
I’m pained that you’re not here
I’m the pain in your nothingness
we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish
water has never been older
we return to the rites
rather than remember to
escape from the moments that cannot
catch our breath
One might wish
to figure out
the measure of the sure,
the doubt.
The pleasure of
an hour’s space.
I am hungry for a language
from the mouth of a foreign country
where sound is a fountain I drink from
in small increments.
Where the word for flowers melt
Eleanor is outside on the porch screaming obscenities at the neighborhood. I know I should pull her back inside, but I choose instead to peer out the living room window, half my face shrouded by curtain, and watch everyone’s reactions. Eleanor is ninety-two so no one dares confront her or call the cops. All the neighbors just assume she’s gone senile and doesn’t know where she is or what she’s doing. But she knows. Everything Eleanor does is deliberate, and usually premeditated at that.
He plays Lysenko every evening until eight,
standing out from the other buskers
in his pressed three-piece suit, white hair garnishing
his temples, serious and straight-backed.
Two poems translated by A. Z. Foreman: The Heart’s Voice by Abraham Sutzkever and Night of the Fourth: A Remembrance by Victor Hugo.
The heart’s voice gave command: once more believe in that debased word “Justice”. Son of the lion, stand and war against your slavery. You must.
My mother goes to the Hawaii Supermarket
& abandons groceries at the checkout.
She had spent over an hour picking cherimoyas
for the altar, cereal for Johnny, Coke
for me, raw fish… Her EBT declines.
When a full orange moon shakes bats from its belly,
when the sky splits open like a busted suture
and pink babies fall into the cumulus cloud bank
above the field of zinnias behind your mother’s house,
The four hundred and thirty-second monthly meeting of the Stoneborough Neighbourhood Association was slightly better attended than the four hundred and thirty-first. Joanne had taken her usual seat in the back-left of the Stoneborough Library Community Service Hall…
You were born on a tropical winter’s day in 1931 , as generous in spirit
as the unexpected gift at an unexpected moment , like Mighty Mouse or dynamite
Come lie back now, breathe deep and take the gas—
It’s just your water breaking, not your bones.
You women you you never think to ask
lament.
find a firebrand and follow,
maybe fondle them. steep
a cup of tea and blow on it
’til your jowls turn sour
I was the only one of my friends without a cassette player, except for Lily, whose father was the head of the Party’s neighborhood branch. Even if they had the money, he would have never allowed it, fearing that music from the West would poison her mind with capitalist ideas.
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