a speckled bloat of metal-ridged rooftops come to life from deep under the roots of blue grama grass stuck over a cast of wither-dry sun beams boredom is rampant plastered in checkered flannel top countertop stale coffee over a pot she is homegrown straight from chernozemic soil Moose Jaw is an...
d i m e n s i o n s w e c a n s c a r c e l y r e c o g n i z e. ever been. The balance of our faces will be alien— nostrils, our eyes round as planets, wide as they have ourselves going grey, left with only the twin slits of our move more swiftly toward our demise. Soon, we find human cells...
Not a pretty structure No beautiful content Ruthless Lots of typos Lots of mean adverbs Repetitive form Contrasting voices Yelling in Farsi Shouting in English Not pragmatic Just dark Stuffy, complex not like-me words Redundant Maddening Screaming in capitals Calling people that not who No clarity...
the world sleeps while i listen. the faucet sings frère jacques frère jacques dormez-vous dormez-vous. what language would i be dreaming if i were. i ask the pillow to consider how in its breaking legacy leads to sitting. leg assis. assis one of many words rooted in my tongue. the pillow says it...
Dogwood blossoms return men materialize down by the tracks one slumped over a shopping cart says he will make some graffiti drink some beer holds up a Bud can—cheers a guy in the alders with a flip phone gingerly raises his hand says hi hi hi by the flattened Coors cases Absolut bottles soot from...
I was as an orchid wearing nothing but the light. You hammered an I into me like a nail, taught me the language of glass as you forged my eyes from the surfaces of sight. You’ve seen it all: the feral child putting on his Halloween werewolf suit, the teenaged boy kissing his breath-fogged...
It’s 2:56 and you are awake. The pulse under your jaw throbs. Carotid arteries throng your brain. The senses reside here, below your jawline, so does speech. You say “service” aloud like a wish. Go to the road, again. Go. It’s 3:12 and you are awake. You paddle your feet under the covers. Your...
Begin by noting that there’s no path to the other side of rain.The only way is perpetually through. A bicycle on two wheels forthe first time. At the viewing, only the mourners keep the...
seafoam sours beneath my tongue spills over in the speaking of a name a tide in my throat, a surge of syllables the gravity of the words i swallow turns my body inside out tears my teeth from my mouth. secrets dissolve in my mouth drops of nectar spear my tongue to my jaw, i speak without saying...
After the painting, The Juggler, by Spanish surrealist, Remedios Varo (1908-1963) Yesterday a great many pellets of graupel shot out of the low grey sky— bouncing ice-balls! Spring’s thunderous shout muffled by its cloudy facemask. We have been too knotted into death counts & pollen counts...
and aspire to something that looks like love. Or is it just the margarine version? Try to do all the things originally on your five-year plan. Pretend they are still achievable. Pretend they will make you happy since what makes you happy can change within a single unexpected glance. How what you...
Pear trees line the grove, netting the sun, sheltering the predators encroached behind the thick green leaves and bodies fat and round. You pass me a knife and ask if I would carve a feast for you, a garden under golden skies and pear skin peels as cries of insects pitch the air. Fireweed...
“The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?” “What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?” —Agha Shahid Ali (Ghazal) i dreamt of tulips today they opened their mouths in a yawn the kind that engulfs the sun in its vacuous mouth like a little hurricane; the sort of yawn that could...
But how could it not, when you used the precise alphanumeric sequence needed to land your words in my inbox? Not what you meant? Let’s begin again. Sarcasm arrives too easily when I’m nervous. Yes, I am well. As in I am doing well. As in I remember to steady myself with deep breathing when...
before lockdown i dreamt that a serpent tried to kill me. so i tattooed it to my forearm in the place of my neck, a vision of black scales & black eyes blazed alight beneath the red of an imaginary sun. when an alien summer leaves you hypomanic it makes perfect sense to carve nightmare...
I am you in your jewel-domed reading room, I am you in your kayak skimming. —Phyllis Webb The sky was inverted. I called you in the bare yellow night. I am you against the river of clouds, I am you in an energy current shaking down the kitchen walls, you in the contrapuntal stream of two trees...
In Loving Memory of Simon (1992-2022) * in the city that screams beauty occurred to me between the city and the city there’s a body of water and a ferry * we have found in ourselves a great proximity to danger we are born of fire and blissful taste of forget I forget how many Is I have written into...
There are rats in the house. They gnaw basket-straws, the cardboard edges of things. Their shit, softening in repeated washings, hidden in the fingers of a glove. Grey stains along the baseboard. They track each other, smelling. Eyes dried berries, swiveling. The intelligence of their tails...
i fear the deluge of careerists tapping concrete in oxfords & ballet flats chic folx in Barbour & Burberry coats released from desks to trains or after hours off king west dead ass with pretty young things, all beauties and good vibes only—so kalos kagathos—made flaccid by business manz...
Read to me in tongues aflame in blame, I asked the past. My prayers burnt to accusations, I cannot get past the past. Killing, not violence if you believe a killer rearranges a body’s time. Rubble of muscle, not soul. All have killed before—so vast the past. I bathed my shadow in a rainstorm...
A flying woman, balances between the cruel heat-drafts of mid July She hovers, between tin-can house-music and picnic-fattened ants whose licorice-backs gleam in the merciless summer heat Her support? The co-conspirator to this rebellion against gravity? Perhaps she’s a childhood friend, a lover...
It’s just fabric, but the shape is everything. Like a boat made of steel, it’s all about how you mould yourself into the world. Like how the body is mostly water but still walks, doesn’t pool and run into the sand, or turn to droplets suspended in the air. Like how even a disjointed sentence makes...
I beg for it short like a boy, Boy-short, please. I come out with a pageboy: gymnast, figure skater. Still a girl. I swallow red. I hate myself. I didn’t know how to quit cutting my teeth/brain on my culture, sweet carts & cameras, cutting through me like a parking lot, making everybody look...
for Kasem Last night I saw clouds turn into paper Stars waning in your eyes’ unuttered anger. How do we speak of love, my brother When tongues are as stagnant as tears?Remember the lonely tree of our childhoodThe inodorous sand, the clouds that turned into cinder? I try to forget my first memories...
cooling my burned thumb at the kitchen tap I’d grasped the roasting stick too high up cold water rushing over the raw spot farther down the stream rinsing yellow plum the neighbour brought over tasting the sour water eye always wander out I kept this in a box, snug I pull the lid off and it rises...
When I say strangle I don’t mean the hands that crush the throat, but the body that won’t resist, confident in its ability to hold its breath, or not. There are nights when I wake up choking because my body wills itself to stop breathing. Tolerates few terrors of murderers or other lovers— silent...
and i’ve killed my tomatoes. their long arms crack, despite the butchness of my shoulders. they insist on death with unrelenting life. my girlfriend and i are gay on main street, in the vintage shop where i bought my first men’s shirt, the one i wore to my second pride, when i blacked out in a west...
shore nursing rubble water scraping brick teeth carmines, umbers urban abscess, coaxed into gaze by strings of 8 o’clock light an invitation to squint. ombak, waves me sand-laden, dragging teenage feet through coast, dark and happy grinning at the sight of Makku, my mother always perched on a...
I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University. I have discovered something, an entirely new species with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided armor, its six-toed fitness for these latitudes and its perfect speckled eggs...
I am told these are among the most dangerous tides in the world. I come from a country with dangerous tides, but only in theory: I am not familiar with that pull. I would not know what to avoid, so I pick my way across, nearest the shore, my soles sucked down, thinking of opaque glass and broken...
just north of the texan blackland is a home with a stale teapot. an abandoned rain boot is the perfect centerpiece for the bottle cap table. and when it rains, it’s where to keep all the petals she’d stuffed in the tissue box. candy wrappers keep us warm. it helps, the crinkling they make...
someday there will be more doors someday we with ambiguous accidental bodies who carry the debt of shame in the thread of our bones will no longer need to be divine someday we will learn to see the shadows on our faces rivered impressions at the spill of our hips for what they are marks from...
hide her inside a ruby. use every pronoun so they can’t pry program from machine. bury him in the left pocket of your bathrobe. lay yr tenderness out to dry on the rails. no one will suspect a thing & even you sometimes will forget it’s there. when you remember her again, they will come...
my parents die in. I do not pray to the sun before it buries s- in the pane of my apartment window then leaks and pools over the pavement sky. Rain traffics my apartment window and dries like vitreous cells, like siren prayers and the river of cars stops. Dies. Sin slows, stops, on the kneeler of...
after Fiona Pardington It is between pest and cholera, she says the world, this state of affairs, down her long, straight lashes she stares, describing the falling of her thoughts on the great indifference of many, thoughts that are weighty like sand in the bottom of an hourglass as we drift past...
Not that it’s enough, simply to adore a person But I adore her The way sansevieria reaches for the perfect ceiling The way hypoestes develops its pink spots like dark room photographs The way arthurium sucks on ice cubes The way golden pothos rests in a trail on the hardwood floor The way aloe...
My sister and I stand barefoot on the radiator, our lacy night dress scratchy against our shins. Delicious jitters as we clutch the high window sill. Night touches our bodies freed from sheets tucked in too taut. A flash of light splits the dark, spiders down electric blue. Thunder shakes the room...
She _ites my lip just a nip a fizzing on my skin we wait at the _us station under zeeting streetlights they crackle like a chip _ag I envy the susurration from the am_er halo, want to tell her “see, that is what is generating the electricity not your z axis cheek_ones or the _atting of your...
i’m from here, drifted in from there, waterlogged, kelped, the sway of the sea still in my knees, where my motion sickness pulls from. like Bà Ngọai, i’m walking as i’m balancing a fishbowl upon my neck, my eyes convexed behind an unseeing lens as clouded as her mung bean yellow cataracts. i miss...
terra nullius: the inverted disposition of thingsin ordinary flux, logging roads and peri-urbanlawn ornaments replicated on the clouds’ nuclearpetals, I watch the patterns on her dress orbit myeyes, my face, my mouth, overlap with auxiliary species of our scape, a cosmic bodice, feminised and...
She lives in one place and one place only: the entrance to a bakery where she has conjured a swirling rainbow display of cupcakes she pictures herself at the counter her voice sweetens an octave for “two please” wheremid she conjures in the cashier’s fingers that plant the sticker on the box the...
Your chef will be the first to saynot a muster of hair should remainas he timbers a fire, wide hands barb your fattened flesh. Thigh all manner of birds; you’re as light as a featherthick as a board. Resentful caretakersbreak their deer, unlacelegs, loosen fleshcleanly from each side of bone...
The major sin is the sin of being born. —Samuel Beckett Hominid-handled bovine bone hammered Kindred skull. No dragging knuckles stopped Him looting dark markets, the self helped To fat figs, muted chops of choice tapir. Early man made primal maul, hammered Raft and drifted. Shrooming troglodyte...
it used to be the world, singularsitting on your shouldersnow it’s each of youwe’ve become so individualized the frayed end of a tasseli don’t know who or what is the single thread holding ustogether at the top but it’s precarious, no i want to weave around younot the finesse of a...
you pull out your day book &inscribe a stellarium on my belly. posed with your phone like a byzantine sainti tilt the word of your miracles to better light. i’m drawing my gratitude list in stars, you saidlike you do. do you mind if i balance this here? i stretch exalted, the breathing altar on...
I. welcome to the good woman. welcome to my mother or my lover. welcome to knowing what will not save me. i want to be clean, washed of conditioning, and rub shampoo dry with the past as a patchwork towel i made from every mistake. i want to cry and not blame it on the aftershave. tomorrow i will...
My queer is naming…….my cabbage patch doll “Madison” after my very best friend. My queer is my neighbourhood. ……..The shootings. Our small blue house with the white……..balcony. The dog, bear, bit the nose……..off Madison. Bit the skin off me. My...
Flitting tails of firebow minnows— lilac fibrils streaked on wheelchair cobble— whipped by the warm pull of august a jug of orchids passes between palms their cups marrowed to bone, indecent gulping against the fold of dusk as if they have yet to live a life of tenderness ……..of shaking...
Please indicate the type of crime that occurred (e.g., home invasion, assault). What counts as a crime? What is the exact threshold? What specific dimensions of flesh delineate the parameters of abuse? He started at the feet and hands, and then the arms and legs; con-men know that the more times...
In summer the grass turned yellow & long, the light grew its leaves over my arm, we kept plants in the classroom, & once, a bunny rabbit. My mother said to bring it home, & there it stayed, till autumn fell upon our faces like the blood-salt of obligation. I & my sister wandered the...
Her eyes glow green under obsidian skies She gives the midnight cowboy a silver dollar and he hands her the elixir sealed with wax She tells me that life begins when you open your eyes in the morning She wants to show me the field where the wild horses run while their watcher sleeps Her eyes glow...
1. Write what you worry about on sticky notes. Throw them on the ground and draw a circle of water around them. Sprinkle salt onto the circle to light it on fire. 2. Start by texting, “I’m worried that…” in a message to yourself. Think about how sweet pecan pie is, and allow...
Pain thuds the drum before I leave the ear appointment, but the clinic staff wave me out the door. The throbs become thumps of bass through floor boards and I call 811, wincing against my pillow. The thumps release into fizzing, then sputtering I laugh off over tea and a roommate’s raised brow...
after Claudia Rankine / Today: You perch at your kitchen table, a swell of distraction surrounding your screen: discarded wristwatch, stained cotton wipes full of thick black nailpolish, your third pot of bitter tea. You click between determination and avoidance, between the crushing metronome of...
Today my mother sent me a framed picture of her heart,ladybug stickers in each corner. A chest preparing for new growth. I’m not sorry anymore that she doesn’t like her life. My poemsare dispirited by her, thick mentions of roadtrips, and landscapesand pissing into Lay’s Stax canisters while stuck...
