The Tran Da Tu poem below is now up on Guernica, a very fine journal of art and politics. In the same issue are interviews with Don DeLillo and Iraqi feminist Yanar Mohammed.
Anstett glances, attempting his best alert, intelligent animal look, interested in project schedules, imagines being taxidermed, pelt propped up with sawdust and armature...
The man who was to fall to earth in four years' time still floated in his cloud of silvered fame...He'd been a Kon-Rad, King Bee, Manish Boy, a Lower Third. He'd be a thin white duke. He'd be a Christ, an alien, he'd be a dance club king.
His house had cracked vinyl siding, cobwebbed windowsills, and blind mammals nesting in the chimney. There was a continual scent of expired milk and a trigger-happy answering machine with messages leftover from the college years.
Moon burnt up in a tree limb's wobble. Heaven's sort of nimble. Not to want the origin of light, to want its myth. To want the stroke across the jaw without the fist.
You are so high in the tree. If you jump you will live a full life while falling. You will get married to a hummingbird and raise beautiful part- hummingbirds.
She looks carved from a ghost. Takes off her dress. It's lace. A spiderweb. She is wearing a slip. Petal pink. Thin as hammered metal. She throws herself on a bed.