Poetry

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…

From the roof of the horse barn, shingles of ice begin their irreversible skid. Hoofprints frozen last December appear freshly stamped in muddy earth. It’s been winter so long, he fears the thaw. What will become of the shadow-self that glided beside him, after the Chevy was parked at the Marathon station, and they skied…

—after Ghassan Zaqtan Dawn breaks slowly here and the rosefinch makes its ablutions in the nascent light. Dust has passed us by as has a westerly wind, and now the quadcopters chatter their morning songs. Minarets are strewn about the city awaiting a proper burial. The shepherd prophets are long gone, dear poet, but the…

Abandoned railway station, Texas desert December 4, 1900* Here they touch people all night with the mouths of rifle barrels. That is how the guards tap out their count of one hundred and twelve Boricuas going rigid inside this chilling box. I close my eyes, I count three white shirts rowing night’s current. Youngbloods who…

When I think of perennials, I do not think of you. I do not think honeybees hovering over petals, nor the sex organs of galaxies of apologies. I think of your mother, rough as an oak’s charm eyes dark & lacquered, two seeds of a riot. She’s not a crone but she crops weeds, threads…

I leave the midnight to find your beginning by way of a village weathering into ruin, by means of men coerced into combat by way of an empire shepherding the work of death. I am here in California and you are there in the Annamites. I seek you by way of retreat, refugees fleeing a…

October’s late vermilion, or the sound a cast stone makes in still water, a starkness to mark the loamy edge of becoming—wants a flash of white flank and mane receding behind the glimmering scrim, shadows moving in—a chill wind spinning in the creaking trees gathering themselves close—needs a stream, a shoot, a faraway spring, musk…