Page 2 - Issue 164 News Today

I’d gone there years before not meaning to stop from the capital northto the lowlands where the small highway joins the narrow-gauge railthat runs from the plantations to Puerto Barrios where bananas meet the ships and flow as though on plates into their holds as Neruda wrotein 1948. Then two days northward to their destined cities then outward by boxcar and semi to the

My father fixed my broken chair with a single shot of vodka,built a bicycle from cigarette butts, a couch from shattered bricks.He sewed teddy bears from snow, cobbled shoes from chicken soup,tailored dust into sweaters, trained my socks to sing like canaries.He planted bent, rusty nails that grew into succulent tomatoes,taught his shoes to cook dinner while he poured me a

High holy enzyme       rile my saliva nameless stimulus       splinter my sleep merciful researchers    pearl out my urgesfor gossip for gristle.  already in your presence I feel myself changed I froth at the bell   I scratch at the cage I rage in my basement hutch.  watch:  there is no place outside of the brain   

Every evening at 5:00 pm, the third wife would raise a bottle of liquor above her head and yell Ding-dong! It was five o’clock somewhere and somewhere was here.

My journey into the expanse of the lyric essay began when I opened Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. At that time, I had been writing poetry for over ten years, exploring motherhood, mental health, and my Asian American heritage. I saw my work as lyric poetry that drew from the bloodlines of my first love, Sharon Olds, and her transformative poem, “Monarchs.”

Ruby was the first one to use the word “twin.” It was a Sunday, and we were all home. I heard the telltale cries from Jace’s room, signaling that he’d woken from his afternoon nap. “Coming, buddy,” I called as I made my way upstairs to extract him from his crib. When I reached the doorway of the baby’s room, I became aware of a second cry, not so much an echo as a harmony. But

All night long I’ve been reading the Oration on the Dignity of Man by Pico della Mirandola,from which one concludes that May 14, 1486, does not exist,that spring and youth are daughters of Marsilio Ficino,that beauty by mythological right is wife of the tripod and the chameleon. 

In his head my brother was a little boy, helpless, when he thought of himself, so he didn’t understand that saying things like I have a black belt or I unlocked the gun case made him difficult, sometimes, to approach.

Lord lightning crumble the lives       of wicked men to salt piles and plastic dog-shit bags amassed in flies Then bless the rest of us      even the screaming kid     the scuttles on the subway tracksthe preacher in head-to-toe Gucci crackling Genesis out a megaphone Bless    the spread-legged grandpa        commuting in a humid car   the bag of hammers pressed between his

     As if nobody heard in the heart’s crypt the bones of the barbarous bird, nobody is nobody. Nobody the senator of suspenders. You are nobody, hat of receptions, and you, medusa hat, your elusive mercy conspiring with another class of nothing.