The Washington Agreement
Time and Place Tuesday, 22 February 1994 (Washington) It is difficult to arrange the days in retrospect, because time has shifted. We flew for nine hours on Sunday, setting off at 11:30 a.m. that day […]
Articles
For Somebody To Be Your Friend
He should have a tranquil face saying how you were together once and how those times glow beyond all other times. There should be two women you two have pleased countless times, whose little laurels […]
Advisory Board
Wayles Browne Farasha Euker Stephanie Krueger Amira Sadiković Sasha Skenderija
An Essay: From Nowhere with Love
When the famous 1985 New York Times Book Review polemic between Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky (the latter, a poet; the former, a novelist—but I like them both more as essayists) came again into my […]
Ulysses
When he’s, usually after midnight, returning home, the cold concrete of the staircase is waiting for him, and he, such as he is, cannot control the tidal wave of ontology: what is when what is […]
Delicatessen
K&T Meats is my favorite butcher shop on Broadway, in Astoria. It resembles me of those in Vitez, Maglai, and other small Bosnian towns, except this one’s jointly owned by six or seven immigrants—Greeks and […]
New Poems
AWARD In the courtyard of the National Library, workers are loading a truck filled to the brim with obsolete books, sentenced to death by combustion in the city’s heating plant in order to free shelf […]
Karl May, et al.
Consider Karl of Ernstthal A. k.a. Kara Ben Nemsi Who’d never been To Ottoman Turkey And only posthumously Bore the Wild West Clear to South Dakota Where a Shatterhand Would as soon kick aside As […]
Far, Far in the North
To Milorad Pejić You who are said to have tracked the reindeer’s scent, I couldn’t follow you. Not because, where you live, images are sharp as razors, nor because entering a warm place would dim […]
Discoveries
I read papers when they’re just brought in from outside, from minus 27 degrees, fresh and cold off the presses. From all the morning papers I remember only one self-sustaining article: like the recipe for […]
Cyclone
a child in rubber boots wonders in the underground at the dripping grates holds up his hand to catch an emulsion of machine oil and water tells the rush hour crowd how he captured the […]
Awakening
To Milorad Pejić I get out of bed – the first step into a new day and the body is flooded with sorrow the very moment it touches the ground, it shakes and whimpers like […]
Contemporary American Poetry
I’ve been wondering how woefully few junkies and alcoholics there are amidst NPR’s contemporary American poets, even how few just plain smokers, and how woefully many non-smokers, vegetarians, globetrotters, and environmental activists. How many poetry […]
To People from Sarajevo
(a greeting) Twenty years before the first multiparty elections as I watched the sweltering road along the seacoast get rolled up on the wheels like spaghetti next to my father’s sweaty shoulder I was taking […]
Critique of Pure Reason
They taught us about the climate of Ethiopia, the sheep population of New Zealand. They taught us the area of the USSR and the countries we have borders with. When my next-door neighbor showed up […]
Spasić (More Than a Game)
To Adin While the country I was born in was approaching its forced landing our life and football appetites were soaring high. Deaf and blind to the questions that’d started exploding right in our faces, […]
Friends in the Universe
Those I know have all grown old, my scattered friends. The snow is getting rusty in Sweden, from the other side of the globe brief electronic messages buzz in: there’s a fire, or else there […]
There Is Less and Less Space
The earth has done its work. We wouldn’t have thought it, my brother and I, but a friend said to us “Your father’s gotten slimmer.” “Huh?” “His grave is sinking in!” We went to the […]
On the One-Way Street, Girl With a Dog
Asja P, the girl with a dog: sometimes I meet her walking her beautifully trained Irish setter. Her father was a philosopher, a well-known university professor, so I suppose he named his only daughter after […]
Picture Postcard
A nighttime panorama of Sarajevo caught by the light of shellfire, gunpowder flashbulbs, by the dance of silhouettes in which only the persistence of vision can make out the former shapes (calling up flickering skyline […]