Opulence

By RICHIE HOFMANN 

 

The night river calms me with its slow dirty movements.
I walk home briskly, in a black baseball cap.
I work at the fringes of the day. I write poetry in bed
and criticism in the bath.
Among my friends here, I have a man
who calls me love names
in four languages. Once, in a moment, I thought I wanted to die
of his pleasure, but that was a wound
speaking. The history of this place
abounds with wounds.
Mobs of vandals have ransacked the villas.
A very rich man on his deathbed
from a corrupt family who loves the arts
was fed a medicine of powdered pearls.

 

Richie Hofmann‘s new collection of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2022.

[Purchase Issue 22 here.]

Opulence

Related Posts

a golden field of wheat

Thresher Days

OSWALDO VARGAS
The wheat wants an apology, / for taking me this long / to show my wrists / to the thresher boy. // Finally a summer where he asks how my parents are / and my jaw is ready, / stretched open so he can hear about them, / easier. // I may look different after, / I will need a new name.

People gather in protest in front of a building; a man (center) holds up a red flag

Picket Line Baby

AIDEED MEDINA
White women give my father shaded looks./ Bringing babies to do their dirty work,/ mumbled in passing. // I am paid in jelly doughnuts / for my day on the boycott. // My dad leads my baby brother / to the front of the grocery store doors / for a meeting with the manager.

Young boys pushing a couch on a street in Palestine

Tall Lyric for Palestine (Or, The Harder Thinking)

RICKEY LAURENTIIS
Because I should’ve wrote this years / ago, I’m crying. So what my slow / failure pass the years / Make me be crying. So what / in Bethlehem I tried to push so / much against it, where the Wall is / checkpoint and weird. So what / My lonelier, sadder blackeraches.