Ventilators in Demand
(they) don’t want mass panicsnakes for your ankles snakes for your (body) everyone maybe gets their own
(air pumps a...
The New Math
March 2020
My daughter pots plants in the desert.
In the desert, pandemic is elsewhere.
Or that’s the theorem.
If the proof is in percentages,
I tell her to...
Your Fire and Thunder
Dr. Li Wenliang, who was the first to sound the alarm on the outbreak of the pandemic, died in Wuhan a year ago, on...
Lament in Time of COVID
This morning’s news comes as relentlessly
as it has for weeks, and today I watch
as Hasidic Jews bury their dead
by the hundreds in Brooklyn, rabbis
sitting...
To Live in Interesting Times
The fluorescent light seems to struggle
against death. Not dead yet, the fixture
pulses every few or several seconds
bequeathing humility to the shadows.
The light is beacon-like...
Two Poems: Youth and To Silence
Youth
Youth is a pig, a certain nervousness.
Blindly, youth trots in,
makes its noise.
Its comma-mouth keeps running on.
You grow comfortable with youth,
stay up each night.
At every...
First a light, then–
“Tag, you’re it,” cancer says
and you fall down the hole, you
or someone you love. Your father, a friend
from work, the wife of the youth...
Wednesday, March
I demand a day without so much fucking sky.
Or, so much brown earth, flattened
as though rolled and pinned
by the muted white firmament.
I loved it...
Midnight in Quarantine
The coyote has long since gone
but the old pit bull still barks
at the edge of the chain link fence
for hours without pause.
I lie in...
Thousand
For R.C.
At the market we’d bought a pomegranate,
weighed its cheeks in rubies for luck.
I set my knife to halve it, kneeling in the grass
between...
Instructions on Surviving Genocide
In the study of comparative
trauma, it is important to ask
how much have you suffered,
and is it enough? Hello, are you still
breathing? No, this is...
In Summer
He uses your full first name
right from the start, and you let him
because neither of you intends to stay:
he'll go home and so will...