Hang it all Yankev Glatshteyn! / There can be but the one Fairfax / but Fairfax and my Fairfax— / Impulsn fun gedank / blitskike un rashik...

If ever there were words for birds These come as some surprise,  distressed, Dying. Days on end, routine as a tide. As awful as a fish who’s drowned. Disturbed as though atomized. In order to …

It felt like a story sorry it’d lost all its sentences, Like a sentence looking for its syntax. All of the words had homeless, unemployed, orphan Written all over their faces. It had that …

A crop duster on the deck pumps DDT into the lake cabin— ah, the year was right for summering, but not for breathing. Oh, years enough ahead for all the kids’ breath and the years they won’t …

Litany Mathias Svalina Shade:          new buildings require fresh blood, or, with reservations,  a boy’s shadow trapped in the foundation. Shade:          by candlelight the solid …

In all her childhood photos that survive, my mother wears a costume of some kind: A scowling gypsy with her tambourine; chauffeur in worn livery poised to drive a cardboard roadster; bold pirate, …

With enough unpleasantness in the air your mind exhales, you can ruin anything.  You can ruin the fifties by thinking  freon,  McCarthy . Spoil an hour rereading ingredients  in the cereal in …

I told you the story in the kitchen,  shouting over the shouting river.  You examined your hands,  the thin lines in your wrists  like the snaking of blue on a map,  then gave your apple a name …

When we were young girls and swam naked in Turkey Lake we were like animals: our legs were thickly furred. We took the trees’ rustling for a sign of their watching. Even the limestone drooled from …

While they speak in cafés of love and freedom and that kind of thing, how could you say love was abandoned, how it eluded even solitude, or how justice is shaped by the chaos of a thousand insults …