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The Photographer

We sat in the narrow plaza filled

with metal tables by the construction site.

It was warm, around 5 pm, one of those

evenings after a long winter where

the city seemed to be anxiously flowering.

Several acquaintances rode by on bicycles.

There was a line outside the pharmacy

on Fulton where they yelled everyone’s

full name and then their medication.

Soon you would travel to another state

to take pictures of a famous dancer.

You think it’s about honesty, you said,

but it’s not, it’s about staging,

also light. Behind you, two floors up,

I could see into my room. The little vases

on the windowsill looked pathetic, girlish,

so carefully arranged.

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For a place I hate, I invoke you often. Stockholm’s: I am eight years old and the telephone poles are down, the power plant at the edge of town spitting electricity. Before the pickup trucks, the strip malls, dirt beaten by Cherokee feet. Osiyo, tsilugi. Rope swung from mule to tent to man, tornadoes came, the wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard. This was before the gold rush, the greed of engines, before white men pressing against brown women, nailing crosses by the river, before the slow songs of cotton plantations, the hymns toward God, the murdered dangling like earrings. Under a redwood, two men signed away the land and in history class I don’t understand why a boy whispers sand monkey. The Mexican girls let me sit with them as long as I braid their hair, my fingers dipping into that wet black silk. I try to imitate them at home — mírame, mama — but my mother yells at me, says they didn’t come here so I could speak some beggar language. Heaven is a long weekend. Heaven is a tornado …

Hala Alyan

From my window …

James McKean

There were commonplace existences, …

Arvid Shulenberger

In a parking lot glistening with shards of glass- …

Philip Asaph

JAMES KUGEL …

James Kugel

It feels like déja vu all over again. …

Jack Myers

At quite uncertain times and places, …

James Clerk Maxwell

On the dogs' path, my soul came upon …

Roberto Bolaño

The glossary

The language about poetry

From aubade to zuihitsu, 207 definitions of the forms, figures, and schools that shape the line.

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