Jon Pineda is the author of three poetry collections—Little Anodynes (The University of South Carolina Press, 2015); The Translator’s Diary (New Issues, 2008), winner of the 2007 Green Rose Prize; and Birthmark (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition—as well as a novel, Apology (Milkweed Editions, 2013), and a memoir, Sleep in […]
What if I told you each time you whispered my name it felt like a door I could place a hand against, feel how warm it was, as if the world on the other side, yours, was the one on fire? “Coma” first appeared in Drunken Boat.
A basket of apples brown in our kitchen, their warm scent is the scent of ripening, and my sister, entering the room quietly, takes a seat at the table, takes up the task of peeling slowly away the blemished skins, even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully. She makes sure to carve out […]
Searching the city for the statue, we found it expressionless in a cathedral, a child holding the world out to anyone. We had no money. We drank thin soup for lunch. Gypsies laughed at tourists, while in bars skinheads peered at other tables and did not speak. It was how it was. Walking […]
It is where she has gone. A spoon clicks in her mouth while her eyes fall back, & the one holding her hand is not me or you. It is a boy, her brother, & he is afraid, though he remembers something about pressing a spoon to her tongue so that metal catches […]
After watching a woman’s fingers sink into bread and scatter its pieces over a river, I have tried to remember how water held part of an evening sun, itself held back by a shadow of spires on the hill, gently tapping […]
Jon Pineda, author of Birthmark (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), talks about his writing time.