For the mangrove to form, water must move slowly, its patience merging sediments, tangling roots into forest, so shrubs and trees, like circus stilt walkers, sway atop the watery surface, and vertical branches form flowered-finger networks, nature’s prophecy. How else can police in the Sundarbans’ plush canopies, its acres and acres of undergrowth, make out the poachers they will slaughter… Read more →
I sign my initials for the man who arriveshe says all the proof is there. Bark beetlesand brown bristles, unshed. He takes the tree down. First the boughsover the street. The leader and the crown.So many branches falling. Like the boy who hanged himself with a leather belt.Nothing above the ladder or the hook.I was like that. Almost a hole… Read more →
It was fair of you to worry I would forget your birthday. The crabgrass has overgrown my tomatoes. Digging in my purse and not finding a pen and paper for new lines is like hopping out of the car at the grocery and realizing my purse is at home. I hear the garden soil calling through the kitchen wall, and… Read more →
He had an itch that needed scratching he told me after this long incarceration even though he reminded me all of the walls were transparently open even though the doors had been locked for as long as we can remember the keys all rusty and immobile and yet here we remain always on the same unchosen side always drunk to… Read more →
It begins with waveform the ups and downs of it following the ridge until the base shifts and the crest breaks on a rocky shore the beach slides oceanward a shallow decline a memory of words unspoken or actions unseen never to be unclaimed it’s a corpus assembled across time a truism lacking choice where words of forgiveness are rarely… Read more →
The truth of numbers he said is that they can always be replaced don’t tie yourself to the mast of arithmetic don’t pick your way through the boulders and bones of mathematics don’t slide and tumble head over heels down the gravitational slope of calculus it’s all a dream * * * * * * * Imagine he said the… Read more →
There is a television in front of the fireplace and I am back, living with my parents. I was never good at compartmentalising. When it comes down to fight – march down to the airport and get them to prepare me a private jet plane flight – I sit on the couch writing poetry & ignore whatever is left of… Read more →
The first time I saw Hilda, I was standing in my neighbor Nicole’s lawn discussing the neighborhood preschools while our daughters, Sabine and Amberley, squatted on the sidewalk. Nicole was weighing the merits of Reggio Emilia versus Montessori when Hilda came outside and stretched as if she had just woken from a deep sleep. Even though it was midday, our… Read more →