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The problem is the metalmarks kinetic in my belly.The problem is their tinsel wings stick in my trachea.The problem is regurgitating everything I swallow.The problem, truly, is the feeling of my empty mouth.The problem is I have nothing to say about the warsor genocide except I cannot comprehend a godwho sheds mercy on those with…

The landlord was a blind man who rattled the front grillethe first of the month—or last, can’t remember, but alwaysit woke me, the rattling for the rent, his hand like a brokenwing shoved through a hole in the grille. He was vinyl blackand just as shiny. A glossy John Crow. Eyes milky marble,unblinking stare pinning…

I do not know what to say but that there was a deersitting in the middle of the highway. She had been hit,but she was alive and folded like a drawing.She was looking at me from her place on the median.The traffic was filing around her and I could notstop. The traffic was filing around…

I’m triggered by being triggered, my pain pains me, I’m upset to be upset, frustrated by my frustration, grieving over grief, outraged by my outrage, disgusted by disgust, elated by my elation, exhilarated by the exhilaration, ruptured by rapture, disbelieving disbelief, rejecting rejection, calmed by calm, having qualms about qualms, repulsed by repulsion, thinking my…

Too often I rememberbeing limber. Unfounded in a boundless sky.There has to be a way to rectify the unyielding. Ink on my hands,the portrait I’m drawing demands no poem. I’ve not earned the graceof metaphor-laced descriptions. My face, dark circles widening underneath my eyes,will not surprise your readers, compromise their status quo, make them ponder…

Us, we are morphemes. There’s no Maltese without Arabic—like one kidney couched beneath the other. The white-ribboned girl in the rubble is singing,her tongue’s washed-out fears in Arabic array.“Tmewwitna,” she says, “tiġi l-mewt u tmewwitna.” She’ll hammer the question, she’s stalking for answers,each consonant caught in the stalk of her throat.The white-ribboned girl in the…

I once heard someone say everythingyou think is not truth. Even now,in the winter no one expected,my friends are being rebornat an astonishing rate: the log crustedover with lichens, the unnaturalleatherleaf mahonia, the hermitthrush with her eggplant-seed belly.After a few seasons, the log will have turnedto powder, having given itselfto several colonies of mushrooms.And what…

“Even if you are not ready for the day / it cannot always be night.”—Gwendolyn Brooks Even if you’re not ready for anything Black, it cannot always be white.Even if you’re not ready for the women, it cannot always be the men.Even if you’re not ready for the spectrum, it cannot always be a binary.Even…

I came from the center of a coal-rock.I hatched when a bird built a nestfrom its straw hair and sat on mewith its whole heavy heart. * One evening, the lightbulb hangingfrom the kitchen ceiling began to flicker.The bulb threw its swinging light at the kettle,which began to look like a speckled egg. The kettle woke to the lightbulb’s despairing voice at…