Poetry

What damage do I do? / The night avoids my eyes, so does the road. / I am never wholly myself, unto myself.

I’m writing a play about a Kommandant at Auschwitz / who recognizes one of the Jewish prisoners/ as a famous poet

Before North took a seasonal job / fishing for kings in Alaska / I’d never admitted to myself / that he was my only friend.

Inasmuch as our faces / bear resemblance, / now, to what // I imagine of them

Able only to recall / his parting footsteps—the chipping away at / a tree one fells at last

Through the window, what light gives / new meaning in the day.

The wings deceive. They do not spread
and thinly slice the air. They rest limp,
almost useless. Dragonfly shape without its dignity.

Digging in dregs of trash
to find the bird my father needed
to get well, I tore a vanishing 
line across the length of my palm.

Three nudes crudely drawn. One crouching, 

back turned, right hand feeding the turtle 

of the painting’s title; another sitting, as if in a chair,

head bowed, eyes downcast; and a central 

Koreatown, Los Angeles

Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.
I stared into her bespectacled eyes.

Ms. Brooks showed me how 
to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin