Category: Poetry

Three Poems

__There Lived a Red-Haired Man__
There lived a red-haired man
Who had no eyes or ears.

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Young God

“The young god stumbles / out here”

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The Subway Car

“Jacob and / the angel / jostling in the / subway car”

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Displaced

“To erase the blankness, / masked the cleaner’s sting / with lavender and sage, / found places for my mother’s / good omens”

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Prose Poem

Editor’s Note: What follows is composed from features published in The New Yorker between September and December 2010. No alterations beyond rearrangement were made to the texts, excepting those that ensured gender, tense and number agreement.

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Standstill

“and so came this sudden invention: /
Fourth-of-July firecrackers /
dipped in sour wine”

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How the Dark Howls

“The same desperate anger which buried them there, / Lumbers over the horizon again”

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My Fair Math Tower

“A brutalist chic makes my heart quite weak / Dare I describe the wonders of Fine Hall?”

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Le Syndrome de Paris

“I look out my bedroom window and admire Sacré-Cœur. The clouds inch past, the sky pales, then blushes, and before I know it the Eiffel Tower is alight, flashing like a jolly giant steel Christmas phallus. Every hour on the hour.”

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After a Certain Number of Leagues

“You’ve said I remind you of those deep water high stress fish: cakey eyes, headlights that make sense in pitch nothing but when taken to surface explode.”

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Miriam Y. Holden Collection, Firestone Library Princeton, NJ

“When Women Look at Men / 8 Million Women Want / Women’s Rights”

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Contrasts

“stars and stripes / color the flag of my birth country / and I am found buried in the pages / of its history”

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