Nightime Worship
For Luis Muñoz Let them give you Mondays back and mark them holidays in your day book so the week won’t weigh as heavy on you and so you can feel […]
Translation Poets
Child’s Play
Traffic spreads through the small neighborhoods that the highway crosses. The streets with medians are now tributaries of a large asphalt river. Still and silent the houses along the way digest their bitterness. From the dignity of the attic apartments the children play, pretending that cars are space ships and the road a cosmic […]
Chapter 7. The gap
(He told me–The Peach) I have thought about the story of language and I know it was a tale of adoration. Nussnacker, he told me, The Nutcracker. He talks about a philosopher, an old man. An old man types, types this, seated at the table, a banquet table so immensely long the […]
Used Books
On one of those mornings when all the clocks’ hands point Nadir and the graying snow neutralizes heart burn, the only thing that can happen is the ring of the door bell: a book ordered weeks ago left on the front steps. The postman doesn’t need confirmation. Geography III, a used book by Elizabeth […]
Small-Town Stations
Trains approach them like ghosts, the way a husband returning after midnight slips under the covers, keeping his cold feet at a distance. A post office. A ticket booth. The slow clock hung on a nail. Some of the passengers have been sitting on the same chairs for a while now. They know you’re […]
Two by Two
He grew up in a small town by the water, where people answer questions with another question. Long summers, rebellious without cause, and on the river’s edges, leaves graying like sideburns. On Sundays, four women wash clothes slapping their men’s shirts on the river rocks. Four other women imitate the first, taking revenge […]
Narration in the Third Person
It begins when you start searching for a darkness that resembles you, as searching for rhyme at the end of a following line of verse, for a little music, or the exchange of carbon dioxide between flowers in the evening. It – the feeling of turning forty. And it’s only a matter of style the […]
Flashback 3
Heart of November. Wind blows like a shuffling of eras. Snow and my mother’s face wait in the background to test their philosophy of inevitability. Lights, like a line of ants, lead to the dining room. I am the bride. It’s the end of the ceremony. And as I prepare to sleep others carefully remove […]