Because names change meaning. Because we hear cries from next door like birdsong at dawn and stay silent. Stay silent on repeat. How unmoved we are when possessors manage their possessions. How accepting we are that there is one. It …
Read More
Genre: Special Feature 2
From a love poem by Montale
I learned about a bug—cochineal—
A parasite that eats the red
Fruit of prickly pear
And then becomes the color carmine.
In another book I found
Rose madder: softer
Red, fugitive, from a …
The trees had taken their crowns away. The birds—those you would need two hands to hold, those you could capture between finger and thumb—had nowhere to rest, so I conveyed them into my house. In my house I had things …
Read More
for Diana
The Lost Tree of Ténéré
was the last of a dwindling grove
of acacias that could not adapt
to the changing climate
or to the hungry animals
that traveled upwind
& yet despite or because
In Just Us: An American Conversation, Claudia Rankine’s latest collection of poems, hybrid essays, and photographs, she sets out to ask a random white man how he understands his privilege. I admit, as I read, I’m a mix of …
Read More
I finished writing this review of Claudia Rankine’s new book, Just Us: An American Conversation, during the week in which a White mob devoted to “vigilante antidemocratic paramilitary violence” (in Reconstruction historian Gregory P. Downs’s phrase) broke into the …
Read More
Special Feature 2
Surrounded by Peach Trees, President Clinton Speaks to My Fourth Grade Class [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Featured Finalist]
Back to School Day and my sister has been dead one year, ten months. This is how you get to the other side. We’ve been moving into a new world. When pressed against
your palm, the flesh of a good …
Read More
Is man no more than this?
—King Lear
From twelve floors up, looking across the roofs,
we get a glimpse of Jersey, glimpse of Hudson,
evening sky. Window wide open. Breeze.
My folks—my mother’s ninety-three and blind,
my father’s …
Special Feature 2
far past the beginning and quite close to the end [2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Featured Finalist]
before revealing the rabbit, after she reaches into you
like the magician into the hat, the will
of touch descending into night, past the stain
-ed mural against the brick, past any tulip or fallen
rose, the lesser pleasures—no, further, …
Read More
