Moon chasing cats, chasing
Shadows, chasing tail ends
of dreams into
satin-slippered cottongrass.
Raindrops, chasing teardrops, chasing yellow eyes and field mice round the corners...
Rain drops roll down my face, freedom is so close, when rain encourages you to live, the whole universe is your building plot. Frontiers of...
Born in Kabul behind mountain walls I didn’t know that one day I pack the world under my skin I will find my shadow in...
Today a poet makes a blessing
on the poets,
the mountains,
temple bells, the aspen ringing.
Athletic White people carry coffee cups or sports gear....
The night is a long gulp
it does not quench a thirst
but it lingers
dripping down
a place where panic
sets up shop
I...
When it’s stinking hot at twelve o’clock, earthy aromas rise and vent. Something’s conjured in a gutbucket and tossed bloodily in a wok to quarrel...
I love the snake that stifles my breath I have built him bit by bit all these years fleshed him with fear so he moves...
Each night my handiwork charts Calypso’s serenade, the arrival of things that can only be made from scratch, a second language learned by the precisionist...
On the pier in the harbour of Guinea-Bissau on the coast of West Africa, where cashews are shipped, and cocaine arrives daily, they wait through...
They tell me the banked fires on every street corner tonight reveal in smoke and tears the face of the one you are meant to...
When the ordinary has become too safe, too stale, we are advised to make it strange, to look again, and magnify until the edges blur,...
All these for my lover:
A rocket science
Telescopes
A map of Jupiter
And a lantern —
Burning from the lips
I love you and...
Candle flame on cold pillar tallow,
Wick bent to dip of our wings,
Lighting up naught over naught of our lift, Stretched days direct most...
Piled on the pews—a hideous laundry stacked and stained (the twenty-two years of blood rust unbreathable), their bodies vanished. But not their clothes— bloodied shirts,...
She was a child, not much older than I, facing the sheep she was herding across this dirt road. Outdoor work crusted on her shoulders....
After I have travelled your scalp
for twenty-two and a half minutes
dissolving the knots
smoothing the cramped
furrows of pain you ask me what...
We wake to a mist That clouds the river road, Hovers over a field Of soft-spun spiders’ nests. Blackbirds beat and skirt The trees, streak...
Madagascar was pulling out of Africa, clumps of calcified ground ferried on water, following the windward trail that produces another year, row upon row of...
Last night
the moon was a bow.
I thought if only I could place my arrow in it I could kill all that lurked in...
There are bodies, selves we cast aside to build the Great Wall. Our home crumbled; we shored up our stake. Tiles, dirt, glass, sticks, the...