Poetry

Confusion is the foreigner’s advantage. Natives 
tamp the nuance in their sounds. Stranger 
seeking refuge pockets vowels, picks gesture,
learns body, gets caught up on the cobble 

Imagine you could learn 
the names of every river,
each upthrust mountain
and fault folded on itself:

There must’ve been some incident, something to push both Dickinson and Proust into isolation, the horse thought as a student, but now he thinks time and immortality require one’s full attention. 

go to the library to learn how to administer NARCAN
to stop their mother or father’s heart from overdosing. 

I would be Diogenes. Swing my lamp
through these dishonest days in search.
I myself have looked the known world
over and given everything a new name.

Your heart is like an island, like a bomb chambered for containment and you should handle my heart like a rare species of flower that grows only here, like a thing that can destroy.

This is the sound love makes—
tolling of a tongueless bell, its wagging
and wagging despite; its whole head
teeming with wind. The sound

                    toenail polish warped waxen from sand, you leave 
          your body behind again—mere rind, edges buzzing
from unsought touch. you end up in a skeleton

In rubber rafts on the open field of the Adriatic, open field of the Mediterranean. 
In a diesel-powered ship setting out from Hamburg in 1939. 

I used to believe there was so much evil in the world,
and though I’m the gentlest of all my friends, I never saw a rose in a vase