where to let time fly. is the night still weighing on the day. school closed. your teachers jumped on and off stage like monkeys on a hot tin roof. hands banded behind their backs, they were kneeling down before a crowd that circled the school auditorium. a photo of the sick old great man was […]
From “The Violet Hours”
Nude Dancer with Aulos by Arnold Genthe. Original from The Rijksmuseum. From the point of view of love, look at this: a bank of purple irises, petals hanging like narrow tongues, the chipped tooth of a lover after tripping in the garden, the blood that rushes between the teeth like a tidal wave. See the […]
Five Essays on Mold While We Wait to Be Cleaned
How Mold Wants a Home as Badly as I Do, But Finding a Home Is the Same as Losing Your Name for It I feel sadness for the mold, a decayed reasoning, swimming pool drained and left with only the scum, but it is a living scum, scum that emanates an urge, the urge to […]
You Came Back / 回来了
i. https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/You-Came-Back-Reading.mp3 (Read by the author) From the outside looking in, the way I look is the most obvious thing about being foreign; that I am most obviously foreign to others here in China. Some people will stare at me when I walk down the street, ride the bus, or walk around the grocery. Some […]
The Representation of Light Penetrating Mud
https://fenceportal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/The-Representation-of-Mud-Spanish-and-English-Alternating.mp3 Absence gives form to all shapes—Theodora Blüht Sand and mountains in the center. The future rises before the fjord. Mercilessly. Stones in the cemetery—the expectation. Shadows, swifter than life. Genuflection. Skin in a symbolic state. The brow performing in a muscular cavity. Bird […]
Year 2089
A valve opens. Electrode fluid enters your brain. You feel the whole Anthill inhale…and exhale. They tune their instruments.
Madre
Madre A woman How many times we fled from the world, How long they burned our hands: Long we served the office of giving birth, cooking dinner, raising beasts. They relegated us to be trophies, in the halls of important men. We bit our tongues in the face of insults, we stayed our fists, before […]
Notes Towards a Failed Book
Any response to the question, “What’s the matter with American poetry right now?” addresses, at least implicitly, the fate of language itself in society at the present time and the role of poets in cultivating and defending language. As guardians of the vigor of language, poets readily — and even stereotypically — express a weighty […]
Inventory
Inventory The hares didn’t move last night but there are signs of a female fisher there and there quartering. What has to eat has to eat. The browse line isn’t visible for the snow. White cedar, then hemlock— the deers’ choice. They have gone to a deer yard some miles off. A fisher can take […]
Composition December ’64
Balraj Manra was a pioneer of avant-garde modernist writing who changed the course of Urdu literature with a handful of innovative, hybrid texts that were published in small, independent literary journals in the sixties and early seventies. It is hard to classify Manra with any more specificity. The best we can do is pay attention […]
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