Your heart like a cathedral/covers us in this instant, like the/ sky/and your song, loud and magnificent, and your volcanic/ tenderness, /fills to the roof like a burning statue.
To Silvestre Revueltas of Mexico, In His Death Read More »
broken teeth. lost retainers. crumpled letters written to counselors
and discarded for illegible handwriting. phone lists of
abortion clinics. deflated valentine’s day balloons with
trampled white ribbon. sales ads on bassinette sets.
Toni Morrison passed away late last night, at the age of 88. May she rest in power, and may we treasure gratefully  all she has written. Here are her words from our Archives. Toni Morrison’s speech “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” was given as the Turner Lecture on Human Values October 7th,
Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature Read More »
I’m writing this on Monday the 16th. I hear a motor outside; is it them? I write because I want these things to be known. If something should happen to me, it’s important that people know what happened and how.
From Reinaldo Arenas: A Memoir of 1974 Read More »
When I look at Viking l’s panorama I have an eerie sense that this may be what the Earth looked like before the origin of life-an interesting, reworked, eroded, developed landscape, but one without the transmuting presence of biology.
Two Ships in the Cosmic Ocean: Reflections During the Viking Missions 1976 Read More »
At her back, the sword. At her feet, the ravine./Impossible to advance. To turn back. Impossible.
When my dad was little, he worked. He helped his father to strip furnaces in the basements of the wealthy and gathered scraps of metal and coal off the streets to sell. But even though he learned to work doing physically exhausting, menial tasks, his expectations for himself had nothing to do with the expectations that the world had for black boys in 1950s Detroit.
Anne Carson’s poem, “Shot List,” first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in 2005. We revisit “Shot List” today, in honor of Anne Carson’s birthday. 
I used to sit in the kitchen and draw when Jean visited my mother. I loved to show my completed drawings to Jean. She made me feel as if I’d discovered an elemental truth, or shown her something vital. Once, when I handed her a picture I’d done of a yellow lion with spindly legs and huge round eyes, she looked at it with consideration and said, “You know, it doesn’t look like a real lion. But I think you’ve caught the spirit of a lion here, and that’s a lot more important. This lion has lion-ness.”
The Woman Who Knew Judo Read More »
I was literally looking at life from la margen (the bank, the shore). I have always wanted to use the feminine gender form of margin in Spanish, the irregular line where land meets water, rather than the masculine one, which is an irrevocably peripheral band of terrain, edges outside the body of words on a page.
“Fronterislena,” Border Islander Read More »
