Poetry

Mare oculus, collect the light that falls as prismcolor-code micro-smells in the rain.Mare os, guide me down into dark cavernswet moss beneath my feet.Mare nasus, to the weaving interior fields of stalks, reachleather-green of pine needles, black twigs.Mare finditur, rift opens below the nose’s saddletoo tiny for my fingertips.Mare mentum, a final hill, driprivulets, slide…

America you never had a black child I tell myself you never had a black child America because I love you still Because I have to love you, since you’re still Alive.     But how are you alive When your black child is dead, who was alive And you were     every moment of her…

On a Russian prank show,a woman gets a call saying her sonhas been kidnapped for ransom.When she doesn’t send the money,she receives a dismembered finger in the mail.Something’s been tearing the ringsoff Saturn. The winds tooare different, some relationshipbetween positive ion contentand a spike in homicides.Is it too muchfor all that is good to not…

try to describe it even one quick linedrawn with unlifted pencil already wrong

It’s a private collection. My love and I pay more than we can affordto walk through this apartment-turned-exhibit. Our guide leads                   us into the first room, which is full of the sort of dark                  that makes you feel gone, that pulls your color out through your heels. According to our guide, this room contains elevenof the…

I do not fear being alone anymore, any more than I fear the “I” in apoem. “I” still do not understand myself completely, and if viewed fromthe corner of the eye, that’s thrilling. “I” am in a lifelong mystery withinmy own ownership. Yet no one, not even “I” will witness its unfoldingentirely. I’ve heard that…

is in our hands: in these bones lashedby ligaments, sheathed in skin. Flex your fingers wide, like folding fans,collapse them in. Muscleless puppets, they are merciless or tender dependingon what moves them. We can train a single finger to hold a body’s weight; all tentogether, to summon a sonata, birth a baby, ball into clubs…

In 2020, I, too, walk through life with hand sanitizer,spraying it on everything. Under the horrified microscope,life blows kisses, sticks out its tongue.The neighbors’ kids stick their noses to the fence.So does mine. Don’t lick the fence, Nathan. Lizzie. Josh.I, too, am desperate for a tenuous separationof destiny from statistics. Before the pandemic,why did we…

With Dickinson, Woolf & Duras I am alive—becauseI am not in a Room— Emily’s fingertips feltthe Morning Glory & Virginiastood straight between four walls worrying about the daffodils & the fig trees.A dying fly bouncing on the windowpane,buzzing, struggling—Marguerite wrote— unknown sky                     it’s overIs a wild garden safer than an owned house? When you make…