Lee Herrick is the author of This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007) and Gardening Secrets of the Dead, published by WordTech in November 2012. He was born in Daejeon, Korea, and adopted at ten months. His poems have been published in the ZYZZYVA, The Bloomsbury Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others; and in anthologies such […]
The blues is what mothers do not tell their sons, in church or otherwise, how their bodies forgave them when their spirits gave in, how you salvage love by praying for something acoustic, something clean and simple like the ideal room, one with a shelf with your three favorite books and a photo from your […]
Yes, the ocean is Buddhist. And the foam scrambling onto the beach is a symphony of cymbals, small and caring like mothers whispering to their children in the front pew, sssshhh. Perhaps then the trees should believe in God. Of course. How they reach straight up after all those years like the Chinese grandmothers rising […]
You are the heart and the lungs of this ocean by which I wave my earthly body, my simple arms curling like commas into the foam. Yes, you are the heart and the lungs of this ocean because we agree to let it be this way tonight, your smile the way home, our home nowhere […]
There are fragments of everything. An artist draws the sun on the verge of arrival. Andres the poet says you can’t fight this heat, it’s too large for us, so pleasure must be discovered in the submission. Two boys walk, one in front of the other, holding him by a leash. A Chihuahua smiles at […]
I have no idea what priests dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun. I have no more sense of what is sacred than a monk might have, sweeping the temple floor, slow gestures of honor to the left, the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us […]
After Hurricane Katrina—A Poem for the Living and the Dead You can live by the water and still die of thirst. I said you can live by the water and still die of thirst or the worst nightmare come true: that body of water taking over the bodies. Sometime, tonight, see which echoes most— a […]
Lee Herrick, author of This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007), talks about the genesis of his poem Salvation.