One of several names given to a ghost island that appeared in July 1831
When the buried volcano erupted,
sulfuric smoke leapt from the Sicilian sea,
seeped through locked, felt-lined chests,
blackening the silverware.
With burning eyes
she rose before dusk
the mountains beneath her
and all the hills
filling like window panes with liquid suns
If I forget you Jerusalem, may my right hand wither away. . .
If I do not remember you . . .
—Psalms 137:5-6
To write in Jerusalem
in a garden
with a wind that comes from the mountain
under a canopy of grapevines
By HONOR MOORE
Of sheets and skin and fur of him,
bed of ground and river, of land,
or tongue, of arms, the wanton field,
Waterfalls of curtain like spray –
Pine needles–flame–shimmer.
The curtain has no secrets from the stage:
You are the stage, I am the curtain.
*
Daily land for the craving landlubber
givest us this day,
art the way. Stars and Mars
inconsolable shine,
sway,
entwine
in the trite.
Salvage cars, salvage cars in the night.
Ignite.
By RAFAEL CAMPO
The neon strokes of Chinese characters
exclaimed the ancient city’s endlessness.
Beijing at night: how much we cannot know,
how little we will ever understand.
By RAFAEL CAMPO
“A state of mind,” my grandfather would say,
the sun as fierce as Mr. Cossimo’s
critiques of everything, from his wife’s sauce
to Senator Bill Bradley.
The water oh the sounds
trapped between two bodies
when the gulls break down
into the waves
and I’m on one shore and you are away.
I walked out there
between the boiling tides,
where the sky turns into a horizon
and the whales go global,
swimming like happy boulders
in an asynchronous landslide.
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