All the Little Clocks Wind Down
Now the blackberries in the yard
have finished their work of fattening with juice.
They wanted to flower, wrote Rilke, but we
wanted to ripen. That meant being dark
and taking pains.
死的 / Dead
is what they call
a torn-up track
whose living rails I jump
to bed down in the wells
and feel the thud
hit every trestle
steam at dawn
like horses at
the track I trained
Dyke March, San Francisco
Do the best you can with your burden.
—Radclyffe Hall
I am reading The Well of Loneliness,
wounds dressed in language,
on loan from the library.
Outside, June blooms in Pride
Eviction
for Wislawa
As if I created this
pyramid of obey and exist.
Between the breathturn stares
of others, also exiled, and those
who called me all but my name,
I nearly forgot that I could,
unlike Lot’s
All the waves arrive bereft of their refugees,
the trees abolish even their ruins,
amassed in the chamber of zeroes.
There is nothing there to be filled:
you could grow learned in noughts,
study the accumulation of chalk.
That too
Sampler
My feminism expresses itself in an intense
interest in what women do.
—Louise Bourgeois
Battlement stitch. And yet this same needle also made the Algerian Eye Stitch, the Peking Knot, and the Spanish knotted feather stitch, made …
Read More
_____
1. Ah kong “Grandfather” in Teochew or Hokkien.
2. Lyrics of a song my grandfather used to sing while he ate bananas, circa approx. 2000–5.
…
Read MoreHEAR THE AUTHOR READ HIS POEM
In Minneapolis, I recently attended an exhibit
which mourned American soldiers lost in Iraq.
One walk through was enough for me. The artist,
who wrote each dead individual’s name in cursive
on a …
An actual gun isn’t part of a man’s
covert junk the last time I checked,
around 2006 in Galveston, Texas.
I was in search of a Glen Campbell
look-alike, with a belt buckle so big
you could serve hors-d’oeuvres on …
