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Poetry

First, find the reliquary:Collect the bones of the mammoth,regurgitated onto the shoreby the agitate cycle of thawing permafrost,rinse clean by the frigid lake’s lapping,swelled in a jumble of reeds

A man on a bicycle.Does he strain into his vocal cordsbecause he is angry, wonderwhy he is riding on this trackgoing around in circlesas his life seems to veer offin jagged directions, no winding

First cited in the sixteenth century (specifically in a book called Dice-Play), the expression [brown study]—which describes a state of intense, sometimes melancholy reverie, really seems to have hit i

of the need for lyricwhispers and fingertipsbehind my earlike a distant melody

of dappled water that flowswhere tulips opentheir soft petals spreadinglike a morning yawn

Solid as fish shimmerleaping from the skyto regain its ground,its Rock River,its Seine.

This bluethis morning is mere garmentsde mes mémoires faibles.

At the birth of a third daughter, on the eve of world war,my grandfather refused to look at heror come in from the barn.In that old country, deepwithin my newborn mother,in my invisible ovary home,

        Tell me     Grandfatherdid you ever        try to scrub outyour dark                   Mediterranean  skin          your Camelsoriginal     Napolitano     tongue

My sister doesn’t do sad.She tried it on a few times,   different styles, different sizes—   nothing quite fit. Either too loudor too dark, too tight or too baggy, she’d say.

It was that summer19 years old     I lived alonefevered with independenceefficiency apartment on Summit Avenuescratch cushions     pull-out couchGoodwill dishes     my boyfriend and I

                        By age three everything’s in place.There’s a closet for storing languagewith all the nouns and verbs on hooks and hangersknowing their places, who comes first

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