like the air ain’t filled with
coarse windchimes
sirens loud as a jet in flight
the quick jabs
of a couple arguing about cheese
and face masks
and children at borders
borders of language
and knotted bellies
I tell you
it’s hard to sleep
when the news is a bare-
skinned sidekick
I try to harden my shell
make it marble
filled with filament
and nails
but how you livin
among the salt, ash, and slate
at your doorstep— all this
grit under your eyelids
My daughter learned to point
in a cemetery.
There were many deaths that year.
The priests’ black shirts grew discolored from sweat.
Florists did well.
Pillowy, white fabric lined the open …
because do calls this house an ecosystem
where straddling folioles tangle mighty-fisted
along a wire canopy he strung
above the brick-and-pot garden, and city fox
coming like a client for bananas they feed it …
Sundays are for the depressed
half-naked
dancing in alleys
of fiction
of fructose
Sundays are for feeling small
submerged in our dreams
misty eyes
and
mild madness
green drapes
and
country music
Sundays are …
Chelsea Rathburn is the 11th annual winner of the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize for “8 a.m., Ocean Drive,” which brings us to the streets of Miami’s South Beach in …
At the threshold of the sitting room
Standing
On the only stair that separates the door and the floor
The device snapped
The father, his amaranth red bubu
The son, his …
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of …
Home can be physical or imagined—a point of departure and return but also a memory or feeling. When migrants and immigrants move across borders, they bring along the places they …
We will keep wake up until the boundaries of insomnia
We will not sleep
We will pluck out the eyes of drowsiness
We will pull the bed away from naive …
pan nuestro
acera nuestra
no debe
desperdiciar dinero
no debe
enamorarse
no debe
decir de más
y la mamá
su tragedia de inmigrante ilegal en Arizona
y …
