May My Right Hand Forget Me
By Poetry Issue 95
when somebody knocks on my door it’s God asking for shelter make yourself at home and recite for me please a sacred song from your native land you who live in exile in the West and the wistful lines of your ancient poem in what language do you speak to mortals in groves we’re promised…
Read MoreAfter Hearing That a Friend Visiting Israel for the First Time Asked Her Private Tour Guide, “Where Is the Garden of Eden?”
By Poetry Issue 90
Where is the Garden of Eden? Can I see it from the hotel, east-facing room on the eighteenth floor? Does the 18 bus stop there? My children, I think, they must have grown up in the Garden of Eden while I was away with work, eighteen-hour nights and days. Look—their radiant faces! Listen—their voices, sweet…
Read MoreIn Defense of Irony
By Essay Issue 25
IRONY, it seems, is the hot topic of the moment. The trigger for this spate of op-eds and Sunday arts-section essays is the recent publication of a book by a graduate student at Yale University. Nearly all of the reviewers and commentators treated this young man’s book the way my kids treat a box of…
Read MoreThe Taste of Eden
By Poetry Issue 87
Do you know the taste of Eden?— the history of the world is on your lips: apples and sin! Fingertip to fingertip God electrifies the elite elect: Adam on the Sistine Chapel, while the devil is on the lam. Who sold Adam to the worm?—script of dust to dust in death’s kinship— God took up…
Read MoreThe Fruit Thereof
By Poetry Issue 83
Hold the phone, it wasn’t an apple, apples have seeds and seed-bearers, check, perfectly fine in vegan Eden, nor does the story name the fruit, botanical paradox, fruit without seed, which even those grapes, supposedly seedless, have at some stage, albeit vestigial, and if the tree delighted her eyes, then Stevens was wrong, beauty in…
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