MAGELLAN (excerpt)
By the end we were starving. Barros and me. Magellan had long since lowered the sails, so we lay on the deck in the naked sun. Sweat trickled through fresh cracks in our skin, and the acid inside our bubbling, distended stomachs sloshed with each rock of the boat onto hidden sores, and with each slow, creaking rock came a dim chorus of moans from belowdecks, where Pigafetta and the other survivors were chained. Magellan had caught them cannibalizing the boatswain. It was an atrocity he would not tolerate, and he made Barros and me, the...
PANHANDLE
We marry and watch for
the kind of fog
we knew back in tobacco fields.
Put the fish in garlic
and curry while the coconut oils
soak into other vegetables.
Surely there is a cathedral rotting
somewhere in a greener rain,
but no red birds and it’s
the red and steaming feathers
you need for the heart to settle into
its untaught center.
