In our backyard, my father,

who never talks about the War,

demonstrates the proper way

to use the sling on the .22 rifle

Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval

This detachment is like undressing.

Gestures, looks, voices now appear

as cast-off clothes.

I baked you a cake. I know it's not your birthday and we don't know each other yet but I made this

for you. I know you're going to like it. I put all my favorite things inside so your tongue can learn

I draw three cards because I need to believe the fortune

has more weight than what I’m able to accomplish

in an afternoon. The ship is sinking or I am juggling

a hand holding the cup I’m going to refill now.

for Avery


think of you first.& then I will think of you again:

Your belongings—Stripey, a whoopee cushion—my heart,

stowed in secret—will lurchpitching, heaving, tumbling,

behind my breastbone,will stagger toward an image seared into

In the fifteen second span it took

to stretch two hundred feet of hose

down the berth of a burning bungalow,

The customer refreshment zone

of this sweeping dealership

nestled along the Interstate

Sulphur saturates air by the ear

listening to gravel pop under truck tires

slow along the ring road, men surveilling.

Each time skylines shivered

through the window, I’ll admit

I was a little rain-rust

and fire escape leap.

Pour soft drinks into the ground and watch a forest of butterfly wings

descend—understory of veins and dust,

canopy torrential with scales, black and orange.

where your brother’s remains

will be scattered, we light up and watch the ashes

fall into the valley. On lichen-rich

A flood is coming, you know. The forest animals have fled.

The cattle, having broken the fence, are long gone.

Your hands float like the moons of two planets

a sickness grows inside the moonlight,

turns under the mud in the corral

the horse churns to fever.

A boy stands at the fence

and whistles to the horse, clicks

What if you saw a starship?
If you went to a window and there she was.
The countless lights on her.
The endless night behind her.
The world dwarfed. You as well.

The TV said the planes have hit the buildings.

& I said Yes because you asked me to stay.

Maybe we pray on our knees because the lord

only listens when we're this close

to the devil.There is so much I want to tell you.

Không có gì bằng cơm với cá...

Don't you know? A woman's love

neglects pride

the way fire

neglects the cries

Paris, 1870


Saint-Léon’s bright new ballet,

Coppélia, showed Peace routing War.

Then the real war hit like absinthe.

Louis, now Bismarck’s captive, lapped

DETROIT. Hundreds of onlookers cheered… as the National Association of Colored People put to rest a long-standing expression of racism by holding a public burial for the N-word . . . Two Percheron horses pulled a pine box adorned with . . . a black ribbon printed with a derivation of the word. The coffin is to be placed at historically black Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery. —Associated Press, July 9, 2007

How I remember your voice on the phone but not the last thing I said to you, the last thing you said to me, how I didn’t leave my husband, how I went back to Miami last summer and was having tostones at La Granja when I saw your brother sitting there having pollo con papas, how he didn’t even recognize me, how he looked older, like a man with a job, how you would be proud to see this man, to know him…

Let us say you are walking near a wetland where red-winged blackbirds nest. You are absorbed in conversation, in a human and social world. Then, over your head and just behind it, the air creases and rips. How do you know—before you even know—to duck, to avoid?