— The sea is so blue, the valley so deep. That’s why sadness goes far and wide. But you must stare it in the eye. Only by braving it will you outgrow the child and be an adult. To the children at Gangkou Elementary School, Hualien County, Taiwan. Ina often calls my name on this […]
Like a prodigal son, Lufuluabo returns. He returns from a long and difficult journey. He will have to get used to the new manners and new names of the avenues and principal squares of the city: Avenue Mobuto [1] is now L. D. Kabila [2] Street; the images of President Mobutu have been replaced by […]
All my bones will say woman. All my bones say woman. Woman. Why do you curve. Why do you adapt. Why do you embody pity. Why. Lips rounded Your streets are lucid smiles Your palate candied. Your bones are bleached deep Your lips two weekdays sealed With golden twine. Your lakes are ancient dreams Crucified […]
BOOK I, 16 You’ll find good, middling, then bad in spades among these pages: So, dear reader, books get made. BOOK I, 23 Bathtime, that’s your banquet’s subtext: Feasting, soaking, double portions of beef. My guess why I never got be your guest? Undressed, I’m not your type. What a relief. BOOK I, 28 Acerra […]
My Wife It was at the end of a dinner of men, married men, old friends who get together sometimes without their wives, boys as in the past. They would eat a long time; they would drink a lot; they would speak of everything. Old and youthful memories would move them; those warm memories that […]
Fantasma Ghost (n.) The soul of a dead person / A disembodied spirit Incapable of passing Freely to a peaceful afterlife, Usually imagined as wandering among living persons. ++++++From Old English gast “soul, breath, life; good or bad spirit” ++++++From Proto-Indo-European *gheis “to be excited, amazed, frightened” La gente no cree que existo. Paso por […]
I. Winter sits heavy in our guts and we can no longer chew —in confident, elegant pride— herbs, bark, and rocks on the rough roads of the diaspora. Poetry left wrinkles around our eyes and tongue a miniature egg wrapped in a cloth and the smoke of a train leaving for the gray snow of […]
Hanging Laundry The eighties: a little boy hangs laundry on a fourth floor balcony in Jerusalem. He clips the clothes on tight, diligent in checking that nothing dangles to the ground— vests, white shirts for Shabbat, socks, the little boy sees underwear and is embarrassed. Today, his mother is no longer here, the underwear is […]
It’s morning, the hawks are hunting. It’s morning, the hawks are hunting. Frightening are those other forms of life which see no value in humanity: the dark forest, the beasts of prey, the mafia, the extremist movements for decent citizens, the enemies for all, the neighbours, The Great Satan. On the way home from the […]
November Bats circle amid the yellow withered plane trees that hover above the old church cupola. The sad singing of the flying cranes grieves the meadow. Autumn toasts white winter. The storm on the other side has no pity, even for itself, and the fire will melt the wind’s rabid song. Twilight masters the soul—it’s […]
After a Night in the Alley of Worshippers The point is not the frayed light of six a.m. or the barking of dogs, half-crazed by the scent of blood, who we had to drive away. Nor the fatigue from a night spent deep in death, the network that only now falls silent, the shouts from […]
[In the white of my poems] In the white of my poems I’m dying Dressed by alphabet letters I escort myself to the grave • The word I write becomes another word How its cry inscribes the page My teeth of wildcat grinding Each poem is a mark of my claws • Evening death […]
From the translator’s note: The biographies that make up this collection are a blend of history and fiction. They all contain events and people that have existed, or could have existed. They are not easy; Davide uses a challenging and unconventional vocabulary . . . The stories in Città distrutte: Sei biografie infedeli deal with difficult […]
April Grammar That night We promised Each other apart Like artichoke hearts Then quickly Cleared the table And into chairs we Fell You Bundled up the afternoon And went to climb Mount Sinai From the bottom of the dark Stairwell Up to your room Hemmed in by dark Windows Into the utterly Laughable futon […]
Folklore is Not the Original Music [The light must be turned on to see the day. The wind will carry away the body’s shell. And all will continue on its course.] You once wished for a god to come to your gathering. But you are a common man, a son of the earth. A black […]
Now what if Now what if it were like in a real mystery where the guilty parties would not be sought out where the strongest suspicion fell but a place no one had thought of and yet obvious to people with hindsight Now what if the ringleaders were only ringleaders in their own and all […]
Mamasafari Some people live and die worse than their cows. When the people were taken away cows lowed in the fields until they died. When I talk about this to colleagues, they turn to one another, as if I’m crazy. How do you talk about that at conferences? That’s much too practical for conferences. That’s […]
The Horizon, Hemmed in Gold Best friend, yours is the right to raft down the smooth rivers, to bushwhack through the black forests at night and to freshen your senses in the streaming wind; to sing to the fields a rice-growing song; to turn your grin upward at the scattered stars; to gaze at the […]
Page 17 Don’t let me leave with little Jamie Bulger, he’s so puny and so scared. Don’t let me let go of little Jamie Bulger, he screams for his mum and wants to go home. On the guard’s monitor we are small jointed dolls in grainy black and white. Two thwarted explorers. Two embalmed children. […]
“Once upon a time, many moons ago, people didn’t have wings.” All the stories my mother used to tell me when I was a child started like that: harking back to an ancient and perhaps mythical time when people had not yet acquired the ability to fly. I used to love listening to those stories, […]
(excerpts from the essay collection Petit éloge des grandes villes (Small Praise for Big Cities), © Gallimard 2007) From JFK airport, Queens; the middle of an October night Rain lacerates the taxi windows. Between two sudden downpours, water runs in rivulets, blurs my view already dulled by sleep. It’s 9 p.m. (3 a.m., Paris time). Car headlights set […]
LITTLE STREET FOR SEX I live in the shopping center of the world, it’s open 24 hours. There are, for example, streets for luminous bodies, and there’s no end to the lights, lace lampshades, chandeliers, bulbs of every breed; then a street of screws and nuts, and an endless line of fish restaurants, a side […]
Papeles No tengo papeles. Así, tengo papeles— En el carro en la silla. En la casa en la mesa En el cuarto en la cama. Papeles de la corte, Papeles del avogado, Papeles del estado, Papeles de la migra. Papeles que me notan, Papeles que me representan, Papeles que me llaman y Papeles que me […]
Just Following Orders With its forelegs a mantis pins down its prey there are circumstances just following orders a strip of rabbit fur by the incense burner releases the wood’s fragrance how can I warm the hearth when all the cranes fly over to the north without stopping to drink water If You Raise […]
Coiffure / Hair-do The beautiful American word hair-do lacks the élan of the French word coiffure. Hair-do is flat-footed & matter-of-fact. It does what it says it does; Americans adore that. I could run hairstylist up the flagpole as a word to salute—that’s as Cadillac as our idiom gets. But Cadillac looks suspiciously French—about as […]
No Voy a Forget Mi amor, espero que Yo recuerde the way You sound with three Buttons undone, tu voz Baja, cariñosa. Will I remember the feel De tu nombre the first time I wrapped my lips around it? When I made the exception To my rule that yo sólo Me casaría con un hombre […]
Navigating wind in the chest I walked the path between two solstices with a swarm of angels a flock of insects, miniature jaguars and the rattle of day still reverberating. Those seminal forces luring me to the honeycomb where the hummingbird and winter cicada whirred. Navigating toward high seas dad and mom are two coasts […]
Six Minutes One night, walking along the sidewalk that coasts a little park that is not enclosed, a park with wooden benches covered in sentences written in permanent marker, a swing on the edge of a very protective silence, in an almost residential area, enveloped (I) in the damp of an autumn that had just […]
To S.B If I’m not dead, if somebody isn’t dreaming or imagining me, then I’m rocking back and forth and it’s cold. Back and forth. To the rhythm of the thing that for such a long time I’ve called heart. Back and forth. Without effort, to and fro. The difficult part is departing, leaving the […]
1. She walks by. Her gait grabs your attention. She is about to go onto the footbridge. At the last moment, she changes her mind. The speakers announce a train is about to enter the station. You look at the clock: almost nine pm. The train’s not yours. Time to kill. Nothing to read. The […]
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