Poetry
Made in Bangladesh
How to suck blood from this blood-sucked / image? A garment worker’s needle is suturing / the scene: she sews a thousand polyester hearts / while her Singer croons, a schoolgirl breasts ...
Help Wanted
Something is leaking / under the sink, unlocated / but gradually turning / the cardboard box / full of Tupperware / to pulp and the damp / smell of basements. The fridge,...
Half
I am all that is wrong with the Old World, / and half of what troubles the New. / / I have not seen Spain or the Philippines, / Holland or...
Contest Winner
This Came First
Behind the kitchen table, April / evening struggles through stippled / glass—corn flung from cobs chewed / into microphones. The children, / / prone to holding after-dinner / spelling bees, wield...
Contest Winner
Portrait of Lady with Cephalopod
Is the girl in the daguerreotype / really staring down the unroofed eye / of the black box in the honeycombed light / / of the studio, dank with elixir /...
Contest Winner
Untangling Gold
1979, Iran / / On the stippled garden rug, mercury dyes my family together / all the dust dancing in some unroofed realm beyond this one. / / Mamanbazorg and...
Contest Winner
Mercurial
We become each other, twenty-four / years and two thousand kilometers / apart. Hard to care about who begets whom / in a hot, Alabamian chapel, or a northern / Ontario church....
Contest Winner
Macular Conception
The car: a mercurial beast, frightened / by his touch or is it he who jumps? His hands / on the wheel, two stippled stones, sinking. / His feet magnets on the...
Contest Winner
safe as houses
The house in a shaggy field, / long abandoned, unroofed, stippled with moss. / Given back to the elements, / / some kind of ancient sacrifice, / shot through with ivy...