Poetry

  • Self-Portrait As Mango

    She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country? I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since that’s all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes are what model minorities like me know nothing about, right? Doesn’t a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn’t a mango a…

  • The Architect

    loved the Mobius, and the sky’s big suggestion                of a universe, and now and then would imagine a heaven as if it were his to construct and manage, death just a pause                before the real work would begin. In truth, and in his…

  • The Lives of My Friends

    The sun may be bright but it is not clear To me why I feel as I do, feeling my way Along the shadowy sidewalks that show No traces of the footprints that should Have worn the concrete down to earth, No hard evidence of the lives of my friends Or scrap of fabric upon…

  • Shooting Dogs

    Do you remember when we were standing around the park waiting for something cool to happen and that friend of ours walked up to a very orange cat and kicked it into the sky like a soccer ball, like the exact opposite of what the animal was, and how it seemed to stay in the…

  • Babushkas

    Stalin’s genocide might never have happened in Pripyat, just outside      Chernobyl, where soldiers told her father who asked to keep a few potatoes, Your soul will fly away and we’ll wrap your guts around the phone wires. Her family nearly killed and ate her. Then came the Germans— posing in lederhosen on the…

  • How It Was

    When he came back he wanted it all to have been the whiff of Gitanes, Place du Tertre silhouettes, carnets de billets, and the Clignancourt jazzers but in truth it was neither the city nor the heart-stopping Hovercraft ride but the long dark night of the North, the Artois, and L’Île de France, where they’d…

  • A Wild Tom Turkey

    When he’s in the yard he’s hard to find not like when he stands in the stubble across the road brewing his voice with deeper and deeper percolations of what sounds like, “I’ll fuck anything in feathers,” stopping now and then to display his fan and perform a wobbly polka, chest heavy as he breasts…