At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian

rinse one another with buckets of water,
warmed from a spigot in a turquoise room.

Their hair a long, flattened cat down their spines,
curved to the bend.

These are antique women
with elegies tattooed on the skin –

a bruise, a mole, a scar where an iron
once fell from the board.

The women forget the devils they married
in adjacent rooms where only men are permitted.

The world is gentler here
among the magnesium and tiled swans.

Water ripples like jellied handkerchiefs
where their clavicles hit the surface.

I am frozen in place by the audacious nudity of bodies.
The brazen loaves of fat in the leg.

Bellies sodden after so many babies.
The quiet, nonsexual touching of women

as they soap one another in the spots of their backs
that none of us can reach on our own.
from the journal SALT HILL
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Israeli Army Soldiers Standing on a Hilltop
"Wordless in Gaza: When Poetry Can Go Where Journalism Can't"

"That’s where poetry can go far beyond where journalism fails. A few words from a poet might chip away at the frozen blocks that support illegitimate power. And we might gain strength from the clarity that a few lines can bring."

via SALON
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Cover of Diver Beneath the Street
What Sparks Poetry:
Petra Kuppers on Language as Form

"In the case of 'Split/Screen,' the magic structuring principle of 'fourteen' hovered in my brain. The sonnet is a device I often use, not necessarily as a formal frame but as a couplet structure to hold against my freewrite. This offers a scaffold toward something that can spread out on the page and take up space in the world."
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