You are 600% hotter than the Sun

Speaking roughly, in terms of heat
generated per every human inch, you give
off more milliwatts—surge/energy. Only 
the Sun is bigger… it matters.

you'll believe me no doubt
each salvo tugs at my hair
each salvo at my breast
in this shell hole
I can only write to you
in my mind
your blue apron

Dans le square des Épinettes,
Les images ne sont plus nettes.

C’était la guerre, c’était la fête…
Des balles percutent la tête.

Being born in Rome, Italy, and living in a city that is imbued with arts and culture makes me very sensitive to the topic. The monuments that surround me have been standing for millenia and are a testament of the creativity of mankind.

there is a poem for you and it may
be like this poem for my wife

who listens to a podcast and sometimes
laughs so hard her earbuds drop

It was always the umbrella floating to the milky clouds. The cow with fiddle, the bride in white, the tilted menorah. And Liozna, your town at the end of the world. Cher, you kept our people alive: the lamb’s blood, the mezuzah donning the doorway, while other tribes clawed at us. The strain of the earth was never in your eyes

I live in the wild/urban interface of Topanga Canyon, so the natural world is all around me. The color green is the most beautiful color--it signifies growth and health on the part of plants.

After weeks in the hospital, nothing is as it was. He takes pleasure in everything he sees. He can’t get enough of watching people, of the smells around him. Only now does he realize that every woman has her own walk and that her way of walking speaks. It doesn’t just say: I’m walking. Usually, she doesn’t even notice she is walking.

Don’t forget me, she pleads, just as she’s
quavering on the cusp of forgetting me.
She utters my birth time—our shared moment
of severing, my astrological starting point—
like a secret code, a charm, the combination
needed to open her built-in wall safe.

After we moved from the downtown apartment, I asked her about her wooden palette, studded with brightly colored planets that seemed to open on an infinite array of possibilities. I also mentioned one of her black-lacquered metal watercolor boxes.

Gangster for some, hero for others, who was really Edward Jones? In the ’30s and ’40s, this descendant of slaves becomes one of the richest men in the US thanks to the Policy business, an illegal numbers game that ultimately became the modern State Lottery.

From the beginning, that was
Only my beginning— I don’t presume
it was anyone else’s—I was difficult. No one
came forward to nurse or clean me. Ashamed
to look away, they could not look at
for I was, if not horned and befouled,

I love the spider and the nettle
Since they are hated;
Their sorry needs are penalised
And never sated;

Darwin can't explain the missing link,
and science, did not invent the goal
of faith in how we think-
but Newton keeps us
sane to find the whole
gravity and reason for our role-
in calculus.

Rudesse de la froidure inattendue ou brûlure lancinante 
Le jour figé dans les glaces ou écrasé de chaleur devient flou
Est-il possible de conjuguer l’ombre et le miel de l’aube 
La déchirure et le regain 
Entre l’encrier et l’enclume 

How fine to be alive, sitting by the Thames
only a month after my second angioplasty.
Then it was Valentine's Day, weeks pierced
by angina, aisles of greeting cards, candy
hearts with "U B Mine" and "Got Cha"

A tunnel of puckish red bud trees blooming on opposite sides of a country road, 
which unwinds like a lariat through river valley towns long abandoned save for motels, 
used car lots, a smattering of fields sporting sheds, RVs, or Camper Vans, and then the ubiquitous car washes and self-storage units. 

I stepped into the leafy stronghold
of the prosperous Finzi-Contini’s grounds—

a phalanx of magnificent oaks and elms 
rumored to be planted by the crafty Borgias— 

I fell in love with an emerald-eyed girl
in an elite, high-walled garden, 

Eden of her “scarcely Jewish seeming” family’s 
redoubtable parkland and estate.

The notion that mothers can simultaneously nurture their children and their careers is often seen as a modern phenomenon, an indication of how far women have come in the march toward gender equity. But in fact, history is full of mothers who reached beyond the domestic sphere—courageous women who overcame societal barriers and changed the world for people far beyond their own children.

Recently deployed Authorial Intelligence (AI2) techniques, composed of drama management components and natural language generation algorithms, combined with a more speculative Reader Intelligence (RI) tool, still in development, offer the opportunity of achieving the long thought impossible goal of autogenerated human-level literary textual events. A small but growing research community is making significant progress toward employing AI2 and RI in tandem to restore integrity to disciplines and industries that advances in narrative autogeneration have inadvertently compromised.