Each night, her mother speaks to her out of the fire: come to me, my daughter. Come into the flames. And the Cinder Girl, the one they call Dirty Ella, even the housekeeper, even the kitchen maid, steps into the fireplace. She burns brightly, hair flaring upward, skin as white as the heart of the […]
Not easy, spending my life in this one house, my nights at this window. Not easy, those first ten years saying no, turning down dances, husbands, till eventually I said yes to avoid the innuendos, and take up what might be termed my life. It’s not Peter I pine for, though he’s why I wait, […]
I hope I haven’t ruined this city for you, As if you could, As if you were bigger than these tenements, balconied and blessed with history, and you had walls dressed to the nines to fives with graffiti, and sidewalks hallowed, haunted by a few sad stories, a few fierce glories, As if you could […]
I never liked the trick with the girl and the swords. The magician would lead her to the box; she’d peek inside, as if expecting it to lead somewhere unusual, a book-filled desert or an ice cream shop only serving root beer floats, right before entering. The door would shut and I’d always think she […]
tahoooooooooo a lonely wolf call in desiccated rivulets, the call penetrating past sinuous rilles as winding as the curves of marian rivera trails off in the cold, thin air a lone bot treks crushing martian rubble under eight symmetric wheels it grinds red stone to dust on its rickety shoulders on its way to the […]
I was five years old when I began to awaken before dawn to watch the first beam of sunlight coax the green wallpaper awake the paisley pattern writhing the way a cat quivers in a leonine stretch within mere minutes the wallpaper would still again and remain so for the next 24 hours during that […]
For Francesca Tell me what the winter whispered to you From icicles growing like candles, from deep snow Like a frozen wave in the shadowed corner Of the fence, from the last red berries Glowing like flames in the faint cool light Of an afternoon sun. Tell me it vowed A god with wings like […]
Jasmine, night blossom, vetiver to my barren heart, let me caress you. don’t go. Your sweet song perched on my ear rings steps into round gates between bamboo groves, a gaggle of cousins underfoot. Grandparents chorus greetings inside while layering symphonic poems of perfume and tannin in handwoven baskets. In the fingerless swelter I fold […]
Keep him. That prince of yours with his hair souring to silver his sword gone to rust, the doormat king, paupered by fear. It is not a horse he rides but an ass, not a lordship he owns, but a home choked with dust, not love he proffers, but lies by the dozen, semen-thick and […]
So now you make an entrance, never my ghost, the partisans’ poet, their luck till the end. Now you waver like a daylit candle seventy-three years burning and not done with memory yet. You came up from nothing but words, hardworking Hirshke, dreamed forests within walls and new roads from the forests and left your […]