Vienna 1933-34

poetry
  “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

poetry
  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

poetry
  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

poetry
  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

poetry
  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

poetry
  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…

Meteor

poetry
  When my evangelical cousin texts You just must never have witnessed a miracle   I think of Doug punting the basketball. We were ten. He kicked it a good…

At Land’s End

poetry
  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…

Open It

poetry
Translated by Aviya Kushner   Open the window open it what do you already have to fear tear the window what is already out there breathe the wild skies beauty…

Eighteen Years After He Left the World

poetry
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

poetry
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

poetry
                          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…