Miss Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer


Whispers of major-minor-diminished from the other room, then a dear have you brushed yet? Soap 
and toothpaste, bed and school. London’s yellow dust. In winter I watched airplanes, silver scaling 
the rutted air. On the ground nothing but false bones: burst ketchup its red a net thrown from stoop 
to gutter. In summer I salted snails, severed ants with exactos—sampling strength on land before 
my exit to water. Antagonized the tutors: Find ten words I can’t spell, one creature I won’t dissect. 
I cut my hair, went south, learned dialects to chat with the locals. Shared starfruit. The sea’s own 
definition of private— 

Like coelacanth-private, down where fruit doesn’t matter, where activity means one rock here, 
another next year. No treble, the chatter all run on the lateral nerve. Hair like twine: “Scientists 
know little to antagonize this fish.” Prehistory exits to my life in a net heaving with prawns. 
Sampled with pins and scalpel, a lab cluttered with sea snails, echinoderms flinching forever in 
metal trays. No ketchup bones here. No dusty shoes, no airplane no seasons at all. I will never ache 
for convention, shared toothpaste, a bed turned down, whispers from the other room.







Spring Dawn: Two Translations

Meng Haoran (689-740)

1.
In spring, sleep past dawn.
Everywhere, everywhere: birdsong.
Rain and wind by night,
Countless flowers, fallen, gone.


2. 
Come spring, sleep straight past dawn. I don’t understand—every other season up before the light, 
before the crows and jays start their bicker and screech. But that hinge between the two worlds of 
spring I don’t know: Night’s wind-driven rain—faster and darker than winter’s slow strum. Then 
daybreak—all my flowers, half-open, stunned and strewn upon the earth.








Rastko St. Sava Eric


Knees down, razor blade in hand, hunting the wood floor. To you it was a joke: the dropped and 
blacked bits of hash I carefully scraped up. You thought I only halted for you. Like Saint Sava 
forsaking his land against a different future—a break from Catholic Rome, a monastic center on 
Mt. Athos—I saw promise when your bright skin and eligible shoes toured the bar. We shared an 
instinct for stitch, an ease with needles, and you I let surge through my high-doored rooms like God 
through my namesake. Never mind later, graceless eyes seamed with tears, the years we broke. 

“Saint Sava resolved the ecclesiastic question in 1219, breaking territory into episcopies and 
parishes, appointing his most devoted friends as bishops…” I stood above my friends on the 
cobbled streets as their stomachs surged easy on horse. You arrived with firstworld eyes and 
handstitched shoes, devouring my gifts of honey and butter. You were just touring futures with a 
blue-skinned passport, an orthodox stroll. But though the infidels swept in on Ottoman hooves they 
halted before Sava’s monasteries. There—enough scraped from the wood to roll into careful 
forgetting. The room’s black corners ring with a saint’s Byzantine chants and you won’t make me 
weak-kneed again.







The Lesson


One May morning I discovered,
while Daddy watered the nailpolish-colored roses,
a curled rat. Whisker-down as if napping, 
petal pink embryo torn out, she was a wet mass
in the speckleshade of our walkway.
I crouched, confused
frenzied ants with the enormous blocks of my feet.
Daddy hosed it away, shaking his head, saying nothing,
it’s nothing, daughter. A mistake.
My toes wiggled beneath me: Grass 
and ant-flecked, pinkly dirty.
The last toe on each side, satisfied and plump,
is missing its nail.
My mother has the same soft pink
ones, Shandong toes. The baby
rat, unborn, curled with the same
genetic arc as its mother. Daddy’s
hose water swirled around both 
pinks: my toes and the smooth backs
of mother rat and child.






Phrasing Saigon 1973


I see through your mapping hands, eyes held back blind. You double me—or is it halve? Green 
army cloth and skin pinked with tonic’s tight glow. Beneath our scarred table, a child. Her scope is 
a lesson in contingent clothes and legs cut off from torso. 

(How do we answer for the killed?) The creeping ivy dries yellow and veined leaves shrivel like 
old hands. Whose idea to string them up on the hot kitchen sill. Thick-bottomed glass clutch, we 
get drunk; the child becomes the blurred word which arrives too late, morning floor creaking its 
complaint of weight. Your sad lips more brilliant now in their grizzled plane. 

A collarbone intuition. The child whispers Aren’t there always easy names on the road signs near 
home?

So stop kicking.