Poetry

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…

My name is all this air and shaped sound in my mouth like an invisible meal and, most days, I tell no one how to get back home. Which way in the night to go that will avoid the silent river and bad neighborhoods and the tracks which bend and groan beneath the tiresome weight…

“From the Unsent Midnight Letters: Remission” —for L   dearly beloved—   you need rest but can’t seem to escape another quiet or not-so-quiet litany   of reasons to spit the bullet of sleep          what if I perish? your worry bells   over & over—: although it rings out work? family? desire?          with time on my breath…

I don’t know why I joined the white sorority. We whispered Latin passwords to each other. They wore white robes and sang to us.     I don’t know where I belong. And the parties, like “Pimps and Hoes” inside a rented Laundromat with fake hickies   and scars on our skin and pimp juice…