Poetry

No tide pools, no couples on the beach
where my parents met,

only whitecaps bowing and lifting,
until each blurs into itself.

[…]

I once believed in heavenly clarity—
do you know how good it feels to sing
of certainty, the wild apricot

At first among certain shadows 
you felt forbidden to ask whose they were.

Metrophobia
I, too dislike it, or at least I find
too much of it bromidic and unrhymed,

Above me in the night
My unknown neighbors walk 
Across a creaking floor

John, you asked me what it was like to be black,
to come from a place where being black mattered.

In the halls of Pigalle, juxtaposition is not intimacy. 
Moulin Rouge Moulin Rouge Moulin
Red—Louise the Glutton spread high in her kick, 

Apollinaire experimented with audacious techniques for generating verse. On occasion he would sit in a café and weave overheard phrases into the composition. Read David Lehman’s translation of “Zone,” the central poem in Apollinaire’s...

I’m nearly eighteen, between ships, moping 
on the mess deck of Coast Guard Base 
Seattle. It’s Saturday night & I’m broke

How could they know,
how could anyone know
you were not formed by origins,