By DAVID LEHMAN
In 1988, I went into the unisex bathroom and read the graffiti. A
graffito from 1980 had been erased: “Support your local philosopher.
Buy a jockstrap.”
By MORGAN ADAMS
I
I take the number 25 bus from Piazza San Marco north into the hills and get off at La Pietra—a stone marking one Roman mile from Florence. Behind the imposing gate, Villa La Pietra waits at the top of the long drive lined with Tuscan cypress trees.[1]This fifteenth-century villa is the centerpiece of a fifty-seven-acre estate of Renaissance-revival gardens,a vast art collection, a library of over twelve thousand volumes, and olive groves with views of the Duomo.
For Lauren Cerand
In my room overlooking
the Mississippi a voice tells me: in my city we bury
our dead above ground a voice whispers
not to lean against
windows not to pry open the window
By ZHENG MIN
Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI
Inside my body there is a gaping mouth,
A lion roaring
Rushing to the end of the bridge,
As the ship glides by.
By YU NU
Translated by STEPHEN HAVEN and LI YONGYI
Morning air pumped off, cannabis-induced despondency
Replaced him and her. Far away, his ball-playing days,
His cap floating on the river, his soft tissues
Like severed seaweeds. This happened in 1976.
The eating is like make-believe, a game
of imitation—sawdust pressed between
two hands becomes a pancake; soup pots steam
By JOHN FREEMAN
My father’s father
rode the rails west
into Grass Valley
and buried three
children in the
shadow of a tree that
spread its arms
around his bakery.
By BRUCE BOND
After Terrence Malick
When the dinosaur, at the dawn of mercy,
lifts his hoof from the throat of his rival
whose pulse you see, whose eye tells you seas
have parted into the ken of separate selves—
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