Vienna 1933-34
“The trouble is—I am an old man— you do not think it worth your while to love me.” —Freud to HD The dog lay by his feet during…
Confessions
The first time I was stabbed, sunlight napped on the thunder. A receipt caught fire beneath a Sprite can offering its smoke. Raindrops splashed from your skinhead. You were…
Night Flight
Translated by Liang Yujing The sofa: a butterball with excess fat sleeping on the sofa. The bedsheet: a spent, bedsheet-thin guy. The mouth: a stomach ruminating lies and…
This mad dance
How did we run naked Through a sprinkler Those summers long ago, The flesh of childhood Steeped in sun, Knowing the shock of cold, The mad dance after To…
January Praise
Grateful I wasn’t the one my mother miscarried. Grateful for being blind in only one eye, for having all my fingers. Grateful a homemade explosive never went off in…
On the A Train, Manhattan
I’m wedged against a man holding the pole with one hand, an iPhone with the other, he’s working a crossword’s checkered semaphore of blacks and whites, each space an…
At Land’s End
This garden, its descendants of Stanley’s anemones, flowing, pearlescent like the insides of shells, their offspring mine now, in my yard, fragile beside the orange blare of Dugan’s trumpet…
Eighteen Years After He Left the World
Translated by Aviya Kushner He was not relevant, in the Population Registry they lost the documents, in the Interior Ministry they claimed it wasn’t possible to verify facts, I…
Forty-nine
translated from the Hebrew by Aviya Kushner Pretty hands, ankles still pretty, white breasts, fattish ass (from where this plenty?) strong gaze weak sight nine-and-a-half years and more countless…
The Land of Cockaigne
after the painting by Pieter Bruegel The table is always set. We can eat our way through anything. Memory and desire silence the squeals of the slaughtered— never…