Korean Boys
summer night in Chicago dark, thick with humidity quiet shredded by motorcycle buzz down Kedzie Avenue Korean boys in black jeans and tank tops with red dragons arms tatooed eyes blank behind mirrored sunglasses black hair gelled into ferocious Elvis waves riding Suzukis and Kawasakis too young for big hog Harleys sneering teenage laughter mocking […]
In the Event of My Demise
I don’t sleep well. How could I? I’m worried all the time, and the media are continuously adding to the list of reasons I should be. Yesterday, during the hours-long wait between the CT scan and an appointment to review the results with my oncologist, I made a pillow of my arms in the hospital […]
Modern Map (Body)
Deconstruct my bones. Scatter the stardust across the skies. Spread my fingers out like mountain ridges, wander, slow across the curves like molasses. Take apart my being, fill the sockets with spray paint and candle wax. Peel back the mirrors of my eyes and memorize the reflection of the past and the […]
Moonlight on Thin Gray Hair
In the narrow room above the temple’s tiled roof, she sits by the window that never quite closes, a small woman folded into years like old incense paper. Mei Yue’s chants rise through the floorboards— soft bells, wooden fish clacking like gentle reminders that all things pass, even the ache in her knees. She listens, […]
Paradox
—It’s this darned corset. It binds. No three-way stretch? How very unchic. Vertigo She sketches lingerie as architecture: suspense, a cantilever bridge, a fraught brassiere plunge, the trellis of a corset wasp cinch, medieval in that grand epoch of Merry Widows, girdles, and garters. let the moon go palely incidental, absent the sky […]
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Peter Pan
Everyone is afraid of dying. Aging makes death seem closer, though people don’t always expire in age order. James Barrie’s older brother died the day before his 14th To the family, he remained a boy. Critics say that Peter represents the innocence and selfishness of childhood. In some versions, Peter and Wendy share romantic feelings. […]
The Desert of the Unseen
Four Sonnets for Teresa of Ávila “God walks among the pots and pans.” —Teresa of Ávila I. The Faces in the Sand The desert opens like a wound of light, its silence older than the breath of prayer; Teresa walks where heat dissolves the air and every grain of dust becomes a sight. […]
Field Guide to What Vanishes
In the glass case: a swallowtail pinned through the thorax with a sliver of silver. Its wings still negotiate with air. The label reads: Specimen, 1843. No one has written wind. A schoolchild presses her thumb to the glass as if testing winter. In the next room a coral reef bleaches under fluorescent mercy. The […]
The River Refuses the Past Tense
It remembers the factory before it was called historic. It remembers the treaty signed in a room without windows. It remembers the first boy who skimmed a stone across its spine and believed persuasion was a form of physics. Today it carries a sheen that impersonates light. A heron stands ankle-deep in patience. Its reflection […]
Lingering Smoke
Mid-morning in the late-autumn chill, I look for the auroral rays in the shadowy grey-dark of half-light, like a restless being awaiting love in the city now turned into a fearful, gaping maw. Blinded by the invisible dust, deafened by the myriad clamour, frozen road shoulders are over-populated, wailing in pain of what seems the […]