Poetry

Because the cemetery was having a BOGO sale (“buy one, get one”) and real estate dear, my mother bought my burial plot the year I turned eleven and broke my leg and you appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the platonic ideal of a pink-and-yellow swimsuit, a form made merely of paint, a…

When my white friends turn to me, upset at my indifference to their conversation about Michael Brown, I point at the lone cue ball I’d been rolling around the table. I spin it and say this is one revolution I can control. It’s how I compress the conversation into metaphor. It’s the only way I…

I am an anagram of my father. In America, it is anapound. It is an archaic system of measurement. I have my father’s eyes. I am made of letters I didn’t learn until I was five. A is for assimilation, which is an anagram for cultural exorcism. If I say I’m glad I can speak…

My mother helped me write the first poem because I knew it wasn’t   safe in there.  Weary people, she began—the cigarette smoke drawing sadness in the air (as if I should do something with all the people). Walk the streets fell into the next line because it was all I could make happen. That…

A horseman was found horseless on the side of the road. We asked after his horse, but he had no recollection, of a horse or of his having been a horseman. And so how were we so sure? How did we know this was a man who lacked the very thing that defined him? We…

After her husband died she sent herself to other worlds Belfast and Paris and some other ununited states—to be in places—as she put it—that felt as strange as the strangeness of the other earth under the one we dream we are standing on. She took pictures of the beyond and sent them over. She wrote…

You didn’t want to ride bikes to Coney Island, so I went by myself, rode the straight shot of Bedford past Prospect Park, past Brooklyn College, until I hit the waters of Sheepshead Bay, then turned right and rode toward the bungee-jump ride I could see hot pink against blue sky. A new high rise….

Down where boxes are folded not only to contain the thanks of every newborn, but also the regressed-back-into-childhood, third from left, a Korean man-child with rosy cheeks throws you a grimace as if he’s had it right up to here … He wants to bark sorely underpaid, packs sugar- bricks to build an army of…

tears for things As for empathy, it was breakfast that taught me first the feelings of objects. Each wet Cheerio floated there despairing, it seemed, to be—bare raft—wrenched like that from its family. Food was just the beginning. I pitied the drooping head of the desk lamp, the light bulb its burning out. I endowed…