Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Altos de Chavon (I)
Light crested as the leaves moved from
green to green, like breathing.
From the roof: jungle, cane and sea
moved to the rhythms of wind, sickle
and tide—various bodies.
None more naked than the pink,
transparent lizards whose entire workings—
gut, muscle and vein—were visible to
the naked eye as they climbed the walls
visible through them.
Evenings, music and the hard-
working moon—so many chinks and spaces
through which to make patterns.
Bodies moved together in patterns
toward nakedness.
Beneath us, the cats brawled, fucked,
and cried like babies, cried so high and deep
the music couldn’t drown them out.
Now and then, a mango fell with a thud
or a giant moth made shapes against the flames.
The elements were welcome. Not one
thing did not hunger to be changed.
The heat ran like a river between us all.
Maggie Dietz is the author of If You Would Let Me (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2026), That Kind of Happy (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Perennial Fall (Chicago, 2006), and coeditor of three anthologies related to her longtime work on the Favorite Poem Project. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Adroit Journal, AGNI, Birmingham Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Bennington Review, and Salmagundi. She has taught undergraduate workshops at Boston University and is currently associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. (updated 10/2024)