The Wing
The morning Nadine’s feathers sprouted, a light snow fell. She was standing outside, watching Meg board the school bus, noticing how the little girl’s hair, frizzy like her own, glistened with snow, making Meg—or Meg’s hair—look surprised, an electrified Who, me? Like a shocked halo. Or a crown, afloat. …
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Making a Life
Sometimes, the break occurs—Lee Krasner You wake up to a grey world. Sky. Street. Morning as a weight, heavy with both light and its absence. Does it matter what colors make up your regrets? Blue. White. Every decision is a betrayal of something. You once dreamed you would write …
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Train Passing by Hospital in Hackensack, NJ
for Sarah Ten weeks for a breast scan, now twelve. The mind is prose and will wander. Here on the range, with an IV cannula hanging from the crook of my arm, the floor changes across the hours, a Rolodex of sunlights. Nothing is like it was: people full of …
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Gibbon’s Decline and Fall
Logan, Terminal C I could do without my sons, she says, the woman rinsing her hands beside me. Natural and artificial flavors, her voice, like flat orange soda— Wait. How is it she doesn’t fear the reach of tragedy’s terrible, plausible legions? Baffled, …
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Aubade
How does blue carpet at once muffle and trumpet clock radio down the hallway to which our bedrooms are rigged, as boats to a dock? A scotched timbre sweet with peat, the generational reveille of Carl Kasell at work: Soviets admit nuclear accident. Caterpillar in a spool bed harvesting …
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Cousins
I heard about Xu before I met him. Ma liked to tell the story when he collapsed in the street while carrying bananas from one side of the town to the other. The vendors made a gurney and rushed him to the hospital. On the way, he woke up …
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Winter Visitors
by pines linger Cato Zilpha voice afire these woods remember her house bones, bricks amid oak copse Brister my epitaph a discolored fortune Fenda Black children rose before roots wild at the edge of myth // let well tempered men salute poetry without spark witness in …
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Fagends at the Whitney
Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Fagends (1967) looms like a monument to all our beautiful ruins. The urethane foam cigarettes sprawl across their stark white ashtray—each one as big as my father’s forearm when he lay in the hospital bed, tubes snaking from his collapsed lungs. I stand here thinking how …
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Study in the Death Ambition with Apple Tree
In love, as in war, I learned _ to skin sweet from meat—you next to me at some farm upstate, where we go _ to pretend we are something together that borders on the country of sweetness—I learned to eat _ …
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