Poetry

I knew how to check for bullets:cylinder release, two fingers throughthe frame: five tiny seeds, five answersto questions my head kept asking.While my parents were at work,I dug dad’s revolver from his sock drawerand carried it around the house.I rubbed the cool barrelon my cheeks, traced itacross my lips like the faggot I wasputting on…

It is the train-off-a-cliff courting,the half-masteyes across a room, fingerslingering too longon the exchange of a book, a cigarette,an apple. Nights of seeing a facein the moon and finallyleaving the window to walk emptydawn streets in searchof a rock or flower to holdin your pocket for luck. The first tasteof the other’s skin, nervous-sweatturning to…

Maybea year can bejust what’s neededtoting its daysas a cloud its nightfresh from the darkA year might throwlight on everythingwho knowsso that all is knownand understoodthat would be niceor a yearmight fail to pleasenot ever wishto pleaseA year involves so muchis it worth trying againthe year won’t saythis week goes bythat week goes bynothing waitsFields…

Some years are lightas airyou don’t even have to lift themfrom your memorythey float their weightless goodiesin and out of your todaywith less fussthan a summer cloud roaming the sky but other yearsare heavy as a suitcase full of a murdered torsoheavier than plutonium or osmiumdarker than ten thousand leagues under the sea—you need the…

Can you believe I have cancer? Yosra asks,holding a mug of tea between her hands,her hair close to her scalp, almost laughing. I try to imagine the cancer auditioninginside her body, tiny translucent sliversof light weaving in and out and of her abdomenand uterus, traveling up and through her throat,needlepoints of light, fireworks fizzing down,…

Sometimes it’s tucked into itself,sewn up like the lips of a prisoner. After the procedure, the girls learnhow to walk again, mermaids with new legs,soft knees buckling under their new sinless bodies.Daughter is synonymous with traitor, the father says.If your mother survived it, you can. Cut, cut, cut. One girl exposes another girls’ secret, they…

Imperative:      to anchorin the present, stay alive to every now— the currency of beat and breathwith which you pay for every stolen step.      * Of sound:      a mortal music; sick,sweet drop and bounce.      * The boys we werebecoming something else. How we ripened through the back-and-forthand stretched to test the empty space above      * The connotation of…

There’s at least another being being you you may / may not have met. You know the theft and that free pass driving the already raging raging mad, scary as scarefest movies like by Stephen King when tombs thrust up from roiling mud in storms obligatory to the Big Reveal. But. No one sees them…

for Grace This is the shed against which you leantat the end of the field, the edge of the world—this, the darkness only half meantin which you feared that fear lay curled This is the crazy, rickety doorof the shed, blue as the summer skybut rough as the autumn sea on the shore,the door that…