Eleven years ago I wrote a poem about looking for feminine protection in El Corte Inglés in Madrid. It seems I was always starting my period in cities I didn’t know well. The first time I went to Miami, for the book fair, I felt a cramp, then a squirt, right as I was about…
Men bleed without insight in prison? A hand on neck starts a fight in prison. He held the night’s air in his fist and screamed, then sent word by scribbled kite in prison. Steve’s eyes broke open to the bluest black, then he sported homemade tights in prison. Marquette splintered, deranged pigeon insane. He learned…
I imagine he sank like copper, a bright flutter, but I wasn’t there when they pulled him out. I only know the splintered dock where they laid his featherweight, and the way Keith’s hands shook hours later, still cool from cradling him beneath the dark bulk of the Palisades. Now, autumn falls around us in…
Grant to my brother that he come here unharmed. Grant safe passage, that he arrive whole and with his eyes open. Grant him refreshment of breath, yellow sand beneath his feet, and in his hands a few coins, a few white crystals of salt. Please grant to my brother, lost now among winds, …
In 1972, the Bangladeshi state adopted a policy to accord a new visibility to the 200,000 women raped during the War of Independence by eulogizing them as birangonas (war heroines), though they were frequently ostracized by their families and social circles. —Nayanika Mookherjee Do you remember what you were doing when they came for you?…
on the wall by the fireplace we can fill it with stones, flowers, toenails, pebbles of shit or scat or something else Anglo-Saxon and indispensable. No books on Texas birds, no botany, the rock is called a batholith, stands 1,825 feet, a large, solid granite dome where white men fled captivity,…
Chaos ignites temperaments. Charge out each day and plunder. Bones be buried. Bones be broken. Renounce blood, a larger black. Each morning renews chaste vows, only to be unbridled by afternoon. The way an ox would plow a field drunk youngsters prove their anger. A cadence of steel coffins hidden by…
Furious snow cardinals & diode array. Methuselah walks by me in coats. Vast brackets of light. Those sugar packets on the road: a branch encased in ice would almost seem to indicate them. The first bomb opens itself in space. By red by half-silvered light—“to home.” How that a life were but a place?…
Bones like a bird’s you quicken your hands, flit and mock, take stock of who’s watching— every move a melodrama, a poised snap, a shot that shapes you as the lead of a film no one can stop. Your fingers play invisible keyboards, your toes point, turn out in stance, your…
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