Poetry

The hour splits with dust somewhere between north and south. A pine tree sways, disappears. A palm tree sways, appears. I am an exile from the California of my childhood. Grass whistles between my father’s grave and mine. The wind raises dust on my mother’s house, cloaking the yard. I listen for water trapped deep…

My father was a brown man. My mother was white. My father was a very brown man. My mother was a very white woman. My father was born in the jungle. My mother was born in an industrial city. My heart, my little lion— It beats faster to say these things Even after all these…

The light isn’t right. The glare from the windows pierces my father’s glasses and he squints as I press the button on my phone. Again, he tells me. Take it again. And I oblige, trying to find a position that would hold him as he is now though he is constantly moving to avoid the…

A tiny scarab landed in my hand. I see how this works. God just shrinks smaller and smaller with every chance you let pass, every opportunity to take the message that the horse delivers, “until God arrives as something, in the end, like you,” I said to the scarab, and with that, as if having…

In truth, who has the energy to be evil? One starts, perhaps, with bar fights, But the dentist bills alone have got to be crazy. Your money’s spent before you’ve begun. And who can actually afford a lair anyway? Wouldn’t we rather have that nice, Three-bedroom, two-bath, with enclosed garage, New roof, and exceptional curb…

Moons falling, invisible hours, my son                                                                                never leaves                                                                     our nest—when the house                                                                              is quiet, it’s most   dangerous. The air deflates to flat, a flag                                               cloaking the rooms. It scares me— this silence—his teenage shadow                                                                   beneath my door, he pauses, moves            on. His footsteps patter                                               and fade, distant like gunfire                                                                                      on the horizon. His noises muffled…

First, you carry no rider. It is to sting and eat sweat, this life, but more it is to live near windows mostly in quiet, or to wait for the fast opening, and when it comes, I want to climb down from myself. I want to leave go the bridle. So I have started watching,…

Caught on my own between homes, I had no choice but to live for awhile in the Lost and Found department of Trans-World Airline at LaGuardia Airport where I worked my first job and could not live. With a key to the dark back of the storage hangar, I made a space of lost suitcases…

Twitter: If you had a mermaid phase as a kid you’re probably bisexual now How did I not understand when I swam with my ankles crossed to make a fin or when I asked my friend to touch my arm, my skin? She wrote love you xo on my ribcage in black pen. All summer we…