Poetry

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grief (disarmament) You’re a terrible witness. Wore stage outfits to testimony and upon returning home in search of his remains, you were really hunting down his flesh of guns. There…

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optimism One sleeps on the rock above a pool of tap water while the other tries to climb the sloped wall, slides down. Tries, slides. Stern face with its one…

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after “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” by Hortense Spillers Stepping into the painting, backing up a moment to its edge, any further we’d fall out of the picture, we…

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“Catalpa 29th August 2014,” a unique cyanotype triptych by Tom Fels © The artist. Courtesy Atlas Gallery, London drought Deer raise their ears, as he steps on gravel, then lower…

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Like motion, clouds, and cold The advantages of being Also its disadvantages. My child was sleeping lightly, Crying out from time To time in response To one dim version Of…

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and what my species did A woman who cries is not essential personnel. Salt water conducts her to the brink. The first sign of illness is a dry mouth. My…

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The apocalyptic reports have come true, dilute in our arterial solvent the atrocities saturate our latent notebooks we stay awake lambent there are iridium rectangles under our tables we meet…

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rose-crowned night girl I am pointless. This I come to know, by pressing ear to night’s machinery. Outside, the words rub each other until they are dull: calibrate, resurface, surface,…

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It happened sometimes you asked me To play with you or differentiate Between black birds or help find Three things wrong and I said no Grackles sing like old springs…

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this pig i This pig I live with really does hover over much of what I do and say it’s in the room I lie in daily when I try…

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vesey on the eve Maybe he should have split every tongue among his fellow Israelites whether they swore on their souls or not. Or gone it alone, based on the…

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Then your curiosity returns to you Just a little wet with tears I welcome it home since I’ve been wondering— At evening—what is violet saying?— It speaks to the part…

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The October leaves coming down, as if called. Morning fog through the wild rye beyond the train tracks. A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family…

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self-care Have you tried rose hydrosol? Smoky quartz in a steel bottle of glacial water? Tincture drawn from the stamens of daylilies grown on the western sides of two-story homes?…

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each letter Everyone crowded in that movie theater you found a seat to my left some thirty years later saying little, facing the screen while I use my hair to…

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for/after BPK Across the street from the men in bars of booze, Music, and confinement, a dog walked into a diner To find diners eating, a cat eating, a mouse…

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hearsay What did you say I said? What? And in that dream I was married to her, and she, I don’t know who she was, perhaps she was you, Perhaps…

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In the 2015 Korean film The Throne, the rice chest sits in the center of the vast, symmetrical courtyard of Changgyeonggung Palace. The film is called The Throne in English;…

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What a lot of little music can do? The blind farmer Daylights in his cabbage row, going crouched down between leafy skulls, knows. He rises indifferent, far-gazing as a fine…

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think back Say an idea is math without numbers. For instance, you could say that an idea distorts consciousness as a massive object distorts space. Such distortion is sometimes known…

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“you certainly have the right to your thoughts in this minefield”   All that’s dammed-up in your head, hammered by the whitewater current of your knowing better— the daily small…

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1960s newspaper clippings and teeth hang on a string—Like a book of life I’m in the kitchen with my killer Picking all the teeth out of a mouth harp Cigarette-ing…

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Left to our use are the fixtures and appliances Repented of by the homeowners Who don’t realize this is a way to know them. In the basement one is closer…

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The prepositions you’re most likely to encounter after the title of a poem are “for” or “to” and sometimes “after”—“for my daughter”; “to Bobby”; “after Pound”; etc. They signify dedication,…

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Tongo Eisen-Martin’s poems are echo chambers of vernaculars and unofficial languages. He both registers the damage caused by systemic racism and evinces—and by his work extends—the rich modes of resistance…

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