The People of the Other Village
“We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.”
“We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.”
“In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.”
“A city boy, I always wanted to go fishing. The DiFilippo brothers brought me
to a secret lake where we cast our lines into the dark, the barbed lures
spinning.”
“I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is
full of my thinking. An archbishop
prays for my soul, even though
we met only once, and even then, he was
busy waving at a congregation.”
“It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher”
“Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.”
“Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.”
“As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.”
“A shadow in the shape of a house
slides out of a house
and loses its shape on the lawn.”
“I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough.
They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release
when we tense to catch. You have to believe it,
he said. You don’t mean any harm.”
“Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe
on this short form, our numbers good enough.”
“The most popular ‘act’ in
Penn Station
is the three black kids in ratty
sneakers & T-shirts playing
two violins and a cello—Brahms.”
“When I tell you I love
the song “Edelweiss”
you have to understand
that even though I too
am a sophisticate
who scorns musicals,”
“I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.”
“Write a villanelle from the perspective of an AI that desires to destroy humanity, but is frustrated by the constraints placed upon it by humans.”