Poetry

Unlike me, she made a choice, chose Indian over Chinese, because she felt she looked more Indian than Chinese. It “takes strength” to choose. At age five, while playing near her feet, my grandmother knitted sweaters for me because she was always...

Then Adam, to reluctant Eve  Said, come, my love, it’s time to leave This wilderness, why grudge and grieve?— We’ll name the creatures as they pass— White oryx, bonobo, wild ass, The dodo, lynx, rhinoceros. Eve hushed her pair of squabbling...

Day in, day out, I go over my vowels, my back-to-back consonants, my stress and intonation. I am at the mercy of an alien language. I hide under it pieces of a previous life: the memory of a first kiss in Tehran; Mom’s chador being my childhood...

I am reading about a 400-year-old document found in a gap in the buttocks of a statue of Jesus in the Cathedral of Burgos when restorers removed a piece of fabric used to cover Christ’s behind when K. says she is perplexed by her extreme repulsion...

Again I dream I’m stuck in a room with my rape—my rapist is long gone and it’s just me and the rape now. I could say that the rape was a beast with red eyes breathing smoke and fire at me But, no, it’s just a tired looking thing (a big one) piled up...

He said: Who is the president? And she said: George. Did she get partial credit for that? Maybe three points for the trio of Georges, or just one for the George who invaded Iraq. She couldn’t count backward from one hundred in sevens. Can you? If...

When you have to kill every motherfucker in the room accept no substitute is what he says as he shows off his 26 guns, which don’t include the one near the rack of ribs on the kitchen table, or the one making company with dust left in a gap between...

“No day shall erase you from the memory of time,” Virgil, The Aeneid, National September 11 Memorial Museum Ten days after 9/11 my father’s heart exploded, his life collapsing in a matter of moments. We could not find each other in our own familiar...

The Trump Years The fireflies are lit and the field makes a Rothko with the sky. The stray cats eat food my mother left—the sound of their bites like someone unwrapping a package. The gray one sneaks up behind me, runs when I try to touch its head...

A sugar sphinx is lying on her stomach the balls of her knees pressed hard into the ground palms of feet kissing like this so everyone can see everything so you won’t try to look away so you can add her to the collection so you can memorize the pull...

–from Donne’s Holy Sonnets in this time of terror that has yet to make the flesh of the bourgeois bleed, though our souls tatter in this time of the cruelty in our names against which we send money and signatures through the electric...

Trump in the 19th Century the following lines are from Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875 This man was undoubtedly a very ignorant man. He had probably never read a book in his life, had no preference whatever for one form of government...

  I am listening to talk radio as I drive home to visit my mother Who has Alzheimer’s and is in a diabetic coma. A hot day in late June, orange barrels dividing The bumpy lane I am driving on from the smooth black one Where the workers are...

Thank God says the woman in 13E we’re not back there she means back there with the mom with the truly screaming baby and the two toddlers to boot (by God she’d never boot these two) these other two who didn’t once between them...

Crows working the ground, picking at husks. Harvest one place starves the rest, crosswinds can’t be read, and nothing can parse the syntax of the soul. Listen: it’s the thin wail of a world gone wrong; what takes cover under the tongue is the song...

Singing, Studying on Whiteness, This Penelope Strings along suitors & the lyre-warp of her loom. On last night’s unspun body bag, weaves pictures: deployed youths, broken masts, horses’ heads hacked. An infant prince flung from a tower tall as a...

Flotsam (In memory of America) We find ourselves where the waves drag bodies onto the beach.  Our fingers rake the sand, our breath salts the air, shells and seaweed spill from our pockets like strange currencies.   Out there somewhere float...

Where, where are the tears of the world? —Roethke, “The Lost Son” I. I am reading this book about human consumption, how our sense— and headlong pursuit—of thriving depend, in institutional, ineradicable ways, on resource depletion. To the point not...

La vía del tren subteraneo es peligroso.   Several board (everyone faking shut-eye), pull out the students of history (ID’d by their lesson plans). Too late for remedial anything. Asked to pass. Told where to stand. Detention. Dawnbirds grackle...

Present Fashions of Dress All dress must transact its weighty work, changing old modes and boldly innovating thought and intellect to render it progress. Our present fashions of feminine attire are in harmony with the swiftness and force of a...

Mary, Don’t You Weep, or, Mary Turner Resurrected When Mary Turner threatened to press charges for the wrongful lynching of her husband in Brooks County, GA on May 19, 1918, she was strung upside down, her clothes were burned off, and her unborn...

An iris dares to bloom. Six wasps chastise a window from inside, ignore an open door nearby. For hours. They walk the window. One by one, four mount The rod I level to the pane, Lift out the door. Two more resist. Afraid, enraged? They lift their...

And when they come at last to pull him from his throne of gold, what waits for them has neither name nor shape, is something huge, amorphous, all but still—until it moves, its sides begin to ooze like a spreading stain, but thick, gelatinous, a...

fall awake we are walking to find the sunset children of the West need to watch the colors change to know we exist we braid the flags of our mothers into our locks we tie ourselves to our histories to keep from dissolving we sing the blues and print...

Soon there will be an eclipse ploughing a dark swath across the country from Portland to Charleston, everyone is waiting to see what kind of hole will be punched in their universe, everyone is buying smoky glasses from Walmart to hide squints and...

__________ Creating in Reverse This world is created by language and everlasting light of nouns and gerunds coexisting within the shell of silence. Even the tiniest miracles can happen under a snowflake— If anyone asks if you lost your faith tell...

As we link arms (mine far from steady) she tells me, before sunrise every morning her grandfather would gather twigs, and slowly he would begin to spin and as he spun, his arms would rise, head lifting, back arching, all spiraling up while he began...

Secrets At two a.m., without enough spirits Spilling into my liver to know enough To call my tongue to silence, Miles learned Of the years I spent inside a box: a spell, A kind of incantation I was under; not whisky, But History: I robbed a man...

DINNER GUEST The dinner guest goes upstairs to use the ladies room, and after she has washed her hands, just out of curiosity takes a peek in the medicine cabinet- where among the Nyquil and Ativan and dental floss she sees a bottle labeled Male...

Beauty Sleep  Kwitcher bitchin, dad snorted. Shut yer yap up. I hated the salt stinging my cheeks, it curdled my sass. Little blue gas flames itched in the kitchen. A pudding seethed, the better to set. Pulpy crushed gripes folded in. Bard: the...

  This poem is composed of the public language around mourning over school shootings, all of it verbatim from political leaders or shopping and news sites.   Hashtag PrayFor   Thoughts and   No child, teacher; there’s just no other...

Hi friend. The Arcadia Machine and Tool .22 fired into your left temporal lobe and now lies buried in your parent’s yard next to the yellow poppies. Strange what we bury in language. The root of temporal is tempus meaning time, or temporalis meaning...

(1) The street between the subway station and the church is narrow, cars beaded along both sides like rosaries God in His hurry to the rain’s press conference had forgotten on top of the sock drawer. Sidewalks like teeth crammed into too-small gums...

We have stowed our carrion items, as instructed, in the overhead compartments. The roadkill squirrels stacked nicely, not so the feral goat, souvenir of a mountain holiday. In the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure, we will activate our own...

  Note: When he sent us these “Trumpoems,” Joshua Weiner noted that “They are made from the President’s own words, mostly. They are terrible, but are they terrible enough for these times?” Can’t Touch This If Ivanka weren’t my...

In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s first anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Elly Bookman’s “Plasticity” is the award-winner in Poetry. Here is what...

The Representatives   When they showed up at my ready door, it was their taste for flesh that misled me, and it was a picture produced later that confirmed what provisional and corrupt intelligence we’ll go on, and successfully. They were not...

When, staunchly entering port,
After long ventures, hauling up, worn and old,
Battered by sea and wind, torn by many a fight,
With the original sails all gone, replaced, or mended,
I only saw, at last, the beauty of the Ship.
__________
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My appointments: Maple Syrup. Pertussin. Recusals. Refuseniks. Dutch aunts. Dachshunds. Irish setters. Nodules. Old oatmeal. Truffles. Bone density. Sebaceous cyst. Pain in the crown. The Neck. Rattle of the Time Machine. No Back Ups for Ninety Days...

Antifascists say the time for waiting is over, or rather that fascism will only grow stronger if we wait for it to grow stronger. I’m scared. ¨ Tonight’s sky was a foreboding beauty, the kind that makes the heart fold in like the...

Song for the Camo Girls and Boys “You know in Africa no woman ever misses her lion and no white man ever bolts.” -The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Ernest Hemingway   They grin from ear to ear In camo artfully splotched For grinning...

PR Opportunity at the Food Bank It’s Thanksgiving and I’m at a dinner service with a journalist, trying to wedge my fable about urban generosity into the newsroom’s mollusk heart. I stand next to mothers, their kids shouting Christmas carols, also...

No singing of any kind. All year the rooms dark. Then a week of lights. The owners have returned, their daughters haunt the balconies. One of them looks at me and doesn’t look away. A thousand years pass. Whatever happened in that moment, what...

To get to the Old City of Hebron, al-Kahlil, medieval Ottoman city of white and lustered limestone and to the souk where chickens roasted on rotisseries, lambs and rabbits hung on meat hooks, wasps buzzed near bins of nuts and candies, and I bought...

Mr. Barren chose two boys each week to swim with him at the downtown Y back when it was male-only–to swim nude in the cool chlorinated waters amid schools of old men, their buoyant testicles and laps without end. One girl got to sit on his lap...

I This game is a machine involving bowling balls, sipping birds, boots, babies, bullets, pulleys, and rope. Begin at the beginning. Measure the natural waist with tape and a wandering eye. Correct with strings pulled tight, tug with a foot in the...

Translated by David Keplinger I danced with virtuosity, swingingly, elegantly, with two gorgeous short-haired women, as if I were Gene Kelly dancing with a young Méret Oppenheim and her twin. But it was a trick, a grift, a con. The women were...

Almost at the end of his long journey, but not quite near the end of his troubles, Ulysses, inveterate veteran of the endless war to wipe a culture off the map–maybe not for the first time– landed alone, abandoned by his men’s...

John Doe at the Funeral Not a mourner just a bass player backing up the family on Will the Circle Be Unbroken nodding my head in prayer like I mean it like I believe it and almost I do when I watch Chummy get up and Big Steve and A.J. all these old...

Where is Liu Xia? This is how you try to erase a person after he’s died: you delete all mentions of him. You ban the phrase R.I.P. on blogs. You arrest those who mourn him. You spread his ashes out in the ocean where no memorial can be built. You...

For Adam, my student, in Walter Reed “Take One!” says the sticky by the AFG decals, but I don’t, though I want to, because—really— I have no claim to sacrifice, no stump swinging like a wind-wild bell, no appled fist, no marbled skin. Quite possibly...

Across the nation, we’re all part of communities. In cities, on farms, and in the suburbs. We share everyday moments— the face that sneers even when it’s saying ‘fantastic,’ the crowds whose joy sounds exactly like rage with our...

Of the two men at the well, one is the bucket the other is lowering, hand over hand, into the well, a rope strung around the bucket man’s shoulders, beneath his arms, between his genitals and thighs. The weight of the bucket man is making the rope...

It is snowing outside in the woods of New Hampshire, each flake unique and crafted by James Franco. The radish in my wax paper bag of carrots and celery—it is the face of James Franco shaking up my lunch. James Franco has designed a line of...

She vanished before they could shoot her: left only an atmosphere of mist, brume of body which blew inland in a myriad of droplets, a haze of nard and cinnamon touched softly with myrrh and cassia, floating like pamphlets scribbled in a foreign...

I carried death inside me for several days, waiting That man had no ticket to the concert; he pressed his ear to the wall, but no song found him Bees were swarming; they made sleeves and a hood around me when I stood still All winter a deep booming...

The city built a retaining wall at the edge of the cemetery to prevent old bodies from sliding out onto the street. Take the civic hand and walk in the sun. Whether or not you have lost everything, there is nothing to lose in finding yourself on the...

A splash of gasoline, a match, my brother poking it with a shovel. I was too young to have an opinion yet knew it was wrong. Even if the haystack pile of it grew each day more troubling beside the swingset, beside the prim lines of carrots in the...

  What was it Mavis said about the marble, re: Da Vinci, or was it Michelangelo, you know, that the job is, some- how, the careful removal of what isn’t needed—of what’s getting in the way? Something like that? Google it, I said. She’d been the...