Category: Issue 35

A scarab beetle steeps in spruce shade. “Vast and inhospitable” is how his vision was described. The urn was unearthed in pristine condition. “Beware the maelstrom,” she said with a smile. I realized the gorge was behind the house. The seminar was long and exclusively cerebral. The party: brief and mood-altering. Do you remember the…

Everything lost is returned again in sorrow.Love lays to rest in a dark glen of sorrow.  Handsome men study their faces in glasstemples I built, saying amen to sorrow. My fingertips turn violet under cold water.I read this as omen when I am in sorrow. Tiger moth, peacock & devil’s butterfly stunned behind plastic by children…

From The Heart Weighs In, a Revolt I am the grass of the wind alley, the tepid stream of bird song, the glint of reasonable doubt, the threat of the last hour, the smile of the still falcon the quandary of mourned daylit webs. I am sun auburn-flecked shells I am childhood and old age,…

“65% of Americans believe they are above average in intelligence” – 2018 NIH article The throat aches, a cushion pinned  by years of acute flounder bones.  Remember, we’re all as accidental as nectar palms living off light  the golden tuba woofs down  during its daily glide across the blue  cotton field of gulls and contrails.…

The Hummingbird Says We Can Fly into the Smallest Places to Heal This late in our lives, the sugar still drawsus to its source. This side of it, I look into the rainand my thoughts are always and to the end,of you. Can someone tell me what rain isbesides weeping? Precipitatemeans both the cause of…

with a title from Jens Lekman I want to begin by telling you I was a child unnaturally obsessed with dying. But no—though God pulled the drum of my skin so taut, its song  rendered my body foreign to itself, my fixationwas wholly natural. And though a seed always already has all it needs to bear fruit,…

Memory trundles across her face, rippling    beneath her eyes like a loose thread pulled,   pleating the fabric skin behind it, on the rare  occasion a nest call hums in the background of a series maman watched as a child: it was the musa, ku taghi? bird, she’d explain when she found an episode online, a…

from TO HEAR A WAR FROM FAR AWAY  This is the beginning, I am told, if we let it be. Arrests if you disagree. Deportations. Sacrifice,  I am moved again to think, must come from how small we have been in the face  of the enormity (the trembling ground, heartache, the sound a barge makes,…

Attendance Spread across chairs, the stairs, the floor, we sit as twoaunts call roll: How many dumplings will you eat? Six, eight, ten. My mother tallies our appetites, 正正正on a doctor’s old note to see if we can spring for them at five cents each. All of us want a breakfrom the bentos—all the rice…

When they put him in California in the bare sun he called it violence, and that—the refusal above all—was how they knew him. Staring into the bleached tarmac.A wool suit in the Pacific Palisades. On the garden patio, he sat with a monographhe’d carried through Oxford, through New York, and read it in the glare…