Search All Winners

I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—

she rides a wild pony for my birthday,

a white pony on the seventh floor.

“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”

the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.

At the center of my life: my mother dances,

yes here, as in childhood, my mother

asks to describe the stages of my happiness—

she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:

between the regiments of saucers and towels,

she moves so fast—she is motionless,

opening and closing doors.

But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!

My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.

I drew an axis through the afternoon

to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—

young, not young—my mother

gallops a pony on the seventh floor.

She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens

what is shut, shuts what is open.

…after dozens of visits, I stopped buying the paintings. Scenes of bright peasant life, or lovely little children in uniforms filing into school, pictures of grand bourgeois families dancing in a hall beneath towering hi-fi speakers, or of shocking voodoo ceremonies in blacks and reds with decapitated chickens flapping in blood and women writhing, panoramas of bustling, abundant markets, paintings of primeval forests, with lions, giraffes, panthers and other animals no Haitian has ever seen at home, where the wildest animal is the crocodile or the flamingo, or the tarantula. It’s hard to keep looking at those paintings, but these Haitian artists paint them over and over again, as though they can’t get this nightmare out of their system. For months, a vendor tried to sell me this one painting, of a church interior, because I made the mistake of looking at it. He started at thirty dollars, laughably high but negotiable. Still, for a long time I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, no matter how badly the stooped and stuttering art dealer wanted to get rid of it, no matter how low he would go. I had promised myself no more paintings.

In this wet season my gone mother

climbs back again

and everything here smells gutted—

bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,

our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling

this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared

orphans out bleating with the mongrels,

                                    all of us starved

for something reclaimable. What chases them,

her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,

shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.

I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s

neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,

her tar this same fish odor I am washing.

I know I am one of them. The emptied.

After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn't complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.

Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged

with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered

for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,

cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love

the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.

Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles

to the inferred shoreline.

As Frankel muses on Progress in his Hillman Minx, Ed Markowitz wearily drives a rented Fiat to the Oriental Institute. He had not wanted to go on the day of his arrival, but this is the only time he can be sure to see Mujahid Rashaf, who is returning to Saudi Arabia within the week. Rashaf is an Oxford fellow and the son of a merchant prince. He will provide just the reasoned yet religious opinions that Markowitz seeks for his book, Terrorism: A Civilized Creed.