by Craig Arnold I’m cooking Thai—you bring the beer.The same order, although it’s been a year —friendships based on food are rarely stable. We should have left ours at the table where it began, and went to seed,that appetite we shared, based less in need than boredom—always at the cheapest restaurants, Thai, Szechwan, taking our chance with gangs and salmonella—what was hot? The…
by Felix Jung How all-American, this eating just for thrill, a feast with no occasion. Any sort of open space we see becomes a place that must be filled. On vision quests, the seeker goes for days without, receiving dreams instead. In darkened movie halls, the screen is always blank at first, and at the end. When cartoon lollipops and…
by Yehuda Amichai For every man in a rage there are alwaystwo or three back-patters who will calm him,for every weeper, many more tear-wipers,for every happy man, plenty of sad oneswho want to warm themselves at his happiness. And every night at least one mancan’t find his way homeor his home has moved to another placeand he runs around in…
by Felix Jung When the winds kick, my stomach falls as if to clutch the ground. I lookaround for trees to grab, a signpostI can cling to. Mary Poppins used the air to float about, but what became of all those nannies? When the gustsgrow strong, I think of them: flailing arms, loose black dresses flapping like sails. Should the…
by Philip Larkin Love, we must part now: do not let it beCalamitous and bitter. In the pastThere has been too much moonlight and self-pity:Let us have done with it: for now at lastNever has sun more boldly paced the sky,Never were hearts more eager to be free,To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and INo longer hold them; we…
by Yehuda Amichai When I have a stomachache, I feel likethe whole round globe.When I have a headache, laughterbursts out in the wrong place in my body.And when I cry, they’re putting my father in the groundin a grave that’s too big for him, and he won’tgrow to fit it.And if I’m a hedgehog, I’m a hedgehog in reverse,the spikes…
by Yehuda Amichai The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimetersand the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,with four dead and eleven wounded.And around these, in a larger circleof pain and time, two hospitals are scatteredand one graveyard. But the young womanwho was buried in the city she came from,at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,enlarges…
by Yehuda Amichai On a roof in the Old City laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight: the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy, the towel of a man who is my enemy, to wipe off the sweat of his brow. In the sky of the Old City a kite. At the other end of the string,…
by Yehuda Amichai My mother comes from the days where they madepaintings of beautiful fruit in silver bowlsand didn’t ask for more.People moved through their liveslike ships, with the wind or against it, faithfulto their course.I ask myself which is better,dying old or dying young.As if I’d asked which is lighter,a pound of feathers or a pound of iron. I…
by Yehuda Amichai Forgetting someone is likeforgetting to turn off the light in the back yardso it stays lit all the next day. But then it’s the lightthat makes you remember.
by Yehuda Amichai After you left meI had a bloodhound sniff atmy chest and my belly. Let it fill its nostrilsand set out to find you. I hope it will find you and ripyour lover’s balls to shreds and bite off his cock —or at leastbring me one of your stockings between its teeth.
I push down, and the needle jumps to eighty-
five. The cars I pass fall back as quickly
as the farms, the browning fields of wheat
by Charles Simic Green Buddhas On the fruit stand. We eat the smile and spit out the teeth.