Category: Poetry

for Karen Shepard I was once a disturbanceand the world the water—sometime pond, often ocean—and that morning nobody was bitingon the question of Bishop’s fish,her words hung on the line, slack,terrible, tremendous, silent seaof existence, how could my professor—hardly thirty, black bob cut—not go under?After class, I bounded back to her officeto apologize for them,…

The artefacts of joy are somundane, as those of terror,the CO.T.RAL bus, my bootsand walking stick, the watermelonI was offered after lightning struck.And all that fear some simple errorof exhalation, microscopicregattas of serotonin, all that ilk,never to be called mundane. I breatheday in, night out. Some shoutcarries across the valley, someonerunning (it could be me)…

Ninety-two degrees.The pool deckshimmies and shineslike an opal carpet.Scorched sapphire globes fall,exhausted and spent.If they were elbows or kneesthey’d be scraped—a tang of blood wouldtease the humid air.Instead, my arms and legsgather freckles, whileemerald leavesshrivel and curlin the four o’ clock sun.Last year’s stiff stalkspoke up behind—angry words hidingin lush undergrowth.Dry and brown,a shade lighter…

Every time my Holiness friends said Join us?,I did. At their Sunday service, there was joyoussinging, clapping, stomping, all the hugging.Arms swayed overhead, faces shone heavenward,and everyone prayed out loud. They babbled in tonguesI mistook for Latin—I was so young—and someonealways got the interpretation. Shouts of Amenand Praise the Lord riddled the sermonwith exclamations. At…

Based on the story of my ancestors, the Jacob Hochstetler family, and the massacre of 1757 Return good for evil. First, choose well your land: beautiful, tillable soil deep in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where “perhaps not a tree or bush had previously been removed,” where later skulking savage shadows will linger at the edge of…

age 24 Sat at your dying grandmother’s bedside, you paint her nails. A soft mauve, grey-tinged, almost like her skin now collapsing into her chest, like a slow-rotting plum, just two weeks after Mother’s Day, when she didn’t answer your call. You had never imagined this, kissing the mole of her left hand just at…

Sing me the lullaby where we collect fallen hairs from the pillows and sew them into our scalp again.The warmth of your ear and neck, the tickle of my fingers slipping under your clothes, reaching until you chide my childishness and take my cold hands.It’s like time closing its fist; each touch a small death—turning…

there is a big jhoola in our aanganwhich is sometimes caressedby the passing shadow of thefarthest growing leavesof our sixty-year-old ber treeit is here that i think ofbeing silent in each other’s presence-one narangi flower-patterned hand of yoursis holding tight to the jute stringto make sure we don’t pause mid-swingi think of your other handcaressing…

It must have felt good in her mouthrolling it around with her toddler’s tonguethe way it fit between her gums and cheekclick-clacking against her milk teethYou must remember it thenthe way the world sloshed about with bravura,the salivating primordial slop of youthI don’t think we were innocent of the process even thenjust a different kind…