Poetry

Too easy, perhaps, to romanticize your behavior by comparing it to natural phenomena. Yes, the bird may land on the branch out of instinct, without thinking (though who can know for sure). The human being chooses to love based on a hodgepodge of past experiences—a sense of humor, shared values, similar tastes, compatibility, even combativeness….

I think, if I could, I’d be anything else in this world.   Mimosa pudica, my leaves closing when touched. I’d go back to 1729,   take for shelter the awful crypt Master kept me in with only enough water   to last between his visits, during which he spoke not to me but about…

after Claude McKay   & what’s the world to carve into your tombstone then? Here lies a man, twenty-seven years old. He died but he ain’t no punk. He was one knife slicing, shit- talkin’ wick. The most lit sonofabitch who’s ever lived. He slept with Smith & Wessons under silk pillowcases. Here lies a…

with lines from D. A. Powell   We unyoke owl pellets from marrow in desert meadow. His mouth pigeon eye,   a torch, womb turned flower. He, still a boy, dug from cactus skull. Undress into bark   beetles. He unlearns how to hold a fist with my hand. Bursts into dandelion   seeds. We…

I.   It’s entirely up to me to remember                     what you said. But all I recall is water,           flour,          strained   yolk adding          up to something beaten and inedible. I placed           my ear to your stomach,          where excess warmth gathers in the name                                           of the body’s clandestine ritual of diminishment. I’d crouch at your feet in the…

I got a carousel of carved horses: pastel pinks, blues, greens safely the most beautiful toy our garden apartment had ever seen   And Grandma Shine gave my brother a flashlight that resembled a roll of Lifesavers   And he was quiet a moment before he began to whisper about the beauty of his Lifesavers…

my friend tells me she’s been running in the cemetery in the afternoon she calls it just-a-garden-really first i am afraid & then i am afraid everything is cemetery & garden my late uncle’s flower shop my daughter learning to fold a paper into a boat sea salt marriage dawn old french music this vertical…

It could be a decade later, years of living an accustomed, an unvigilant life. I trust my surroundings again, like a person instead of a witness. I could be shopping at the grocery, choosing one of the fancier cheeses, when I bump carts with my ex, my whiteness. Oh my god, this is where you’ve…

an apostrophe for Isamu Noguchi   Is stone the opposite of dust? And if so, aren’t we stone before dust? And before that,           some kind of betwixt? The mush inside a translucent chrysalis turning cellophane-clear when, all of a sudden, you can see the           Monarch throbbing and scratching its way into air—   unlike a…