Poetry

plums melt on linens washed just yesterday the stain is shaped like her face she thinks a fan moves the air but she has no desire to rise she cannot tell her daughter about her bed about her cold pillow & sweat- drenched sheets or how figs are the only food worth eating in august

I. At night, I move among the beds. In this city, the streets are corridors branching into alleys that run between bodies wrapped in gauze. I speak this language native to wounds: friable, purulent, granulating, necrotic. We say serous and mean straw-colored. We agree this drainage indicates healing. Serosanguinous, still a fine rosé. At the

I am yaqui, pasquali, Mexican, pronghorn, sand lizard, gringo, I and the sons and daughters of migrant dreams Gringos come south looking for eye candy Hot tamales and discounted medical care Mexica’s head north Hungry for a slice of apple pie With dreams bought on credit And hopes Western Unioned home each fortnight I am

     1. Gdansk. My father in a pram. That’s his older brother Moshe standing like a soldier, his cap pushing out his ears. Grandmother and grandfather on the settee wear borrowed clothing from the photographer: grandfather a black frock coat over a high-collared shirt, grandmother some dusty, Edwardian straight jacket. They’re not smiling.  The occasion is

I was trying to inhale the dry air of America by videotelephony. I thought I had nothing to contribute. “All I can think of is smell, because I made a pie and I had some essential oil burning to get rid of the smell but all I can really smell behind the oil is the

Let me take you into the room where I slept in a stranger’s house. Let me take you into the darkened room by the amber glow of one small lamp— into the musty room of the two-story where I slept the untroubled sleep of an innocent; then opened my eyes to see, as if in

On the freeway’s shoulder, I keep a tightrope. The officer says, Put your hands behind your back. A gravestone. Barbed-wire. Trees grow through anything. Cells divide & flow. Swallow the chainsaws. The brain is just neurons. An LLC in Oregon to turn corpses to mulch. Turn flesh into something more useful than ash. There’s a

  The other night as I was watching Rocky 3 for the millionth time I believe, I cried when Mickey died in Rocky’s arms his anguish as real as mine I felt it within me welling up, the tears pouring down like the Dollar Store wine I drink nightly the weeks of holding it all

none of our mothers believed they were dead they peeled things, boiled things, bled, bled, bled they worried over the price of meat, wore red none of us believed we were born of wounds we have our feet our bantiki our books our capital letters & our dreamed battlegrounds you see how I cannot decide

‘—in mid-step, in the yellow suspended capillaries, I Freeze; the guests have come unbidden; retreat, retreat! I trust my husband not to dash my son’s brains out, I Trust the engineer was sober; trust the bombs sleep. I check the locks, I check the locks, I check the locks. I trust my body, I trust

Like all things, it begins as water and ends as water As water, it may become vapor, steam droplets on a window, a heaviness in the air we bring into our lungs It may become dew or dog piss in the grass, a body’s nourishment or excreta Residue from the time when it once had

The raw pearl my mother gave to me, that I gave to you. I carry it sometimes in my dreams, its memory swelling like a blister. Forged from the blood of the Pacific, little grain, little ache on the tongue. * If you held it in your mouth, it would be smooth, semen-colored, embryonic. If

I’d petitioned with the power of a molting butterfly to be more than just a sack of polysyllabic slick wisdoms delivered with a staccato snap of righteous fingers. I preferred the grieving soprano whose octaves on moonlit, bonfire nights dampened cheeks and garnered affectionate caresses atop my head. this is why I’ve agreed to supply

                            after José Olivarez   because we’re here: everywhere.  loud. & colorful. & yes  we know crooked but o bless our mothers’ hands. what miracles they carve out of our spines.  what blessing it is to swim  in the rivers inside our fathers’ and mothers’ palms. & how we toil to prove that the way  they

From the dirt we are born, from the ground we breathe life. Waiting just below the surface until the time is right. A soaked up raindrop. A ray of sun that spills over me. But not just yet. Tiny footsteps above me. And a breeze I can’t yet taste. Worried of the world without me

A mortal never challenges the gods. Weak and raw in the flesh. At least not intentionally with jealous or spite. But something unquestionable. Undoubtable. Unasked for by human. Gifted instead. Bestowed upon woman a treasure indeed. One that no man, mortal or god, Could question. Beauty in the form of woman who walks the earth.

no milkstork at the bombed-out shrine in Hamamatsu no wholesomeness three sizes bigger, fatter my mother said that people brewed the tender leaves that steeped in fragrant matcha, mastered yeast from rice the poets tended no kine that cattled cud—no farmers choking on the gases who were these half-calf kids who schooled me in belonging?

Against the open palm of your dusk I place my fist into your first day of spring and you sing about death by the sink as you make tea. There was no light pollution and the stars were before You had instructed me not to take off my shoes in case there were scorpions on

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. —Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus” In recognition of my life, the gods  provided me, in death,  this mountain,  this stone.  And forever… we all  get that. But what good  would forever be, without  a mountain,  a stone? * Sisyphus, the stone whispers,  are

Sing into   the thunder drum  crow hopping   from one foot to  The other, and             hops will follow  My chants and dancing           as I invoke  Crow’s wings with my arms  Extended in the falling snow,  hovering into the darkness,  my spine vibrating to              the sound  of my voice, until leaves become  buried   under this   frozen

A heavy cloud of Saharan sand swirls over the Caribbean for several days. The sepia veil is so intense, at high noon the sun looks like a full moon. A thick film of dust on everything. We must stay inside. The air quality is compromised. Ever the poet, a part of me smiles at the

Why not ask if her quizzical smile, aloof              plain              timeless, is not a blade, pointed at the one who dares attempt to capture her? The so-called “master” who speaks to the canvas as if she were not in the room. Perhaps, she has

the sea is called / a body & the children / are still dying / so far from here / & here sometimes / bones rearranged into / drowned or dragged off skyward / biopsied or blood– slicked pavement / at night / when the white pines cut against an un- / white sky /

Turkish smugglers caught him in the wild and trapped him in a veiled cage, hung in a cafe. Deprived of light, the goldfinch mourned, his song a prayer of lament. Sorrow breeds melodies. Pipe smoke wafted through the room. The men meditated; they puffed nostalgic rings into the air. The goldfinches’ plaintive song lingered and

There’s a hole in this poem, a hole where all the usual ways I know to write a poem are stuffed to block the cold wind of the unexpected, a hole that allows the loud world to decide which portion of itself to poke through and require me to describe it or address it, a

Not unafraid of the Taliban takeover. Waiting for what happens through the bars and veils. What about the whale that washed up on the private beach? They couldn’t find anyone to relieve them of the stench. Still we smiled at the red boots on the big furry dog, turned our heads away from the man

in the late summer of a state on fire they prepared for my birth with buttercream guns or glitter, in the streets where kneeling on necks the blue horsemen snuffed another dark breath they drove, masked, to the mall for plastic feet to spear into frosting, in the dry wind they dreamed of lures or

But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. —Moby Dick I’m sitting by the pond where

After Alice Walker  Glory! Glory! Glory! when Breonna Taylor did not walk back out of her apartment, i found refuge in instagram thread of videos where Black people are full of joy. come, let  me show you a sanctuary made of deep dimples and gummed smiles.in the first video, i remember the forgotten humanity in

Her body shaking, she raises her ankle up to her waist, palm up palm down, arms vibrating bangles to the elbow. This bank teller turned devi who swallows flames, takes the soot from her mouth and rubs it into foreheads. Sticking her blackened tongue out, she’ll start searching for men to gather at her feet.

we tremble through the metal detector – Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! Go ahead! bouncing off polished stone named after dead presidents, shoes & wallets & black plastic tubs, histories scanned for threat down the conveyor belt, Vietnamese woman shakes so hard her legs won’t work, we go ahead with our bodies

                     –after the 1967 Arthur Penn film  Their penance—not yet exacted— Warm wind, from the open windows of the pulled-over canary-yellow Model A Ford. Clyde flipping the radio dial. Static. Insects. Chirping. His shit-eating smile. Silence sparking through sunlight— but for a rush of starlings entrained with the dapple-lit couple as if—like the fiddlers and

 of my pickaxe, the arc it formed at the crossing you and I were sent to fix—the road cratered on both sides of the tracks, wallowed out by trucks loaded with wheat—  if I could follow my pick’s shadow slicing toward your shadow— dark and wild, gathering weight and speed in the bright June air—and

I The client fights his gag                     begs me to stop. He’s forgotten his word                      the one he chose. I never had a word.                             His agony blooms & sweetens like a four o’clock flower.                  Another afternoon of violence more cries of never-enough.   II The tree outside my window              leans left, shaped by the wind of

Alacrity—not my middle name— boldly lays siege, item by item, to a miasmic to-do catalog approaching zeal. That’s someone else’s doppelgänger, not mine. I’m more easy-going (except when I’m not), a laissez- faire drop-by-whenever, give-what-you-can kind of gal, list-less. However you slice it, whatever its name, I gave up on musts and have-to’s just after

When asked the date of their return in spring, google provides baseball timetables. In a May snowstorm, a male grasps the tine of the hummingbird feeder with prehistoric feet. His wife, yellow-chested to his orange, builds her pouch of a nest in a high tree, ejecting eggs of parasitic cowbirds. In spring twenty years ago,

What does one do to protest when one is Black and woman in city sandy white and military and lonely? My lover, like Yahweh, is prone to the hyperbolic— never leaving nor forsaking, his anger always just and provoked. But he is numb and unmoved this lynching season. I am unsure of my capacity to

A Nativity scene carved in granite. ** The bullfrog swells, pauses, holds his song like a brass paten beneath white jowls. ** This penny on the sidewalk you can never pick up, no matter how long you let your nails grow. Could be a fluke of gravity, could be glue, could be a magic intended

the first time I got stung by a swarm of I was going to say hornets but they’re not I know what a hornet is compared to a bee but I’m not entirely sure if a hornet is the same as a wasp I suppose I could look it up but anyway these were yellowjackets

when she died, i might have been eating churros out of a white paper bag licking the cinnamon sugar crumbs from my fingers and the corners of my            cherry mouth, she called it or i might have been sitting in front of our family computer listening to a song about nightswimming           or         stolen hearts and        

Let’s untwist to 2003: My aunt slams a pair of size fourteen Skechers at my feet. They are large and lumpy like the Appalachian Mountains Boy, you betta wear these shoes I bought you. You can’t be worrying about what people say at that school about your feet looking big. Betta man up!  Now swing

From the Styx memory foam a girl stems, fumbling to get why in the coil of what. Every what twisting for its scaled tail. From Thetis’s wedding to gravity’s threshold, the girl travels, the world unhinged like a door drowning in its frame. Snakes skinned alive too learn their bodies to be cartographic loops. Apple,

                                                  I didn’t like a lotta shit going on  you know daddy                was an alcoholic all his buddies still remember me cause I be in the joints while he was drinking shooting craps or whatever they doing daddy                     just wanna                         boy all them        Korean costumes       are boys’ costumes in them pictures Like

You’re walking downtown, thinking maybe you do miss the costume, the stupid codename, the old headquarters-turned-Bank of America, when the white guy bumps into the woman in front of you, and is off with her purse. You give chase, of course. It’s easy enough to catch him and pin him against the wall / punch

Satori can surge upon you on the subway, lectured Dr. Tufail in Intro Zen. The mire gives us the very substance of art, goes Lorca’s Play and Theory of the Duende. A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom, reflected Little Richard in a Macon Greyhound terminal’s greasy spoon, up to his biceps in Georgia suds, boss- man piling on pot atop

Above the boulevards of sweat where the kids     are gathering again at the back     of a public bus to plan     the resurrection     of laughter an old woman    on a bench    slides both pink shoes     off her feet at the beginning of spring so she can sit    a while longer and look   at

I don’t know how I feel about so many masters painting me that stupid blue and calm as if I were not all salt          fish shit and whale scum Doldrums Lunar collaborations Tradewinds and crosscurrents     In your language when you say titanic    colossal       to grasp my vastness so do you measure my

A golden shovel after Suheir Hammad   A hummingbird lavishes the lilac on the first morning I am by myself and the open window ushers in decanted perfume, sea, rain on the brink of falling. What slipshape prayers a woman must make of her body. To write my way out of the stories of war

The officer is kneeling on a man’s neck with the full weight of functional eardrums. When the audience begs for mercy, when he knows it is thoroughly engrossed, he shifts his weight a little, for effect, makes eye contact and holds it— what command he displays of this inheritance. Note the capacity for illusion, how

To Ziad Khaddash   I If you see me drowning, do not throw me a life buoy. Throw me a fish. She swims better than me.   II If I see a fish drowning on the seashore, I won’t put her back in the water. We will go together to a vegan restaurant. She’ll have

we plant seeds in the rain today a slow drizzle falling on our faces as we bend over the little herb garden bed we share a pair of green knee pads both wearing one on our right leg like the uniform of some rogue gardening gang the rain beads on our slick jackets as we

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

  soundtrack: feat. phatkat, j dilla make it spare stark & simple. make this mark, not too clean make it crack static & pop the sound equivalent  of  rough.  feel  every  bump.  texture  this  landscape  you  map  it  i  ride surface glide each moment. it’s all action. you built this up. make it move something

—for Adlaw, after Anastacia-Renee / after Kamau Brathwaite, with listening to Honor Ford-Smith, Aracelis Girmay, M. NourbeSe Philip, Roger Guenveur Smith, and Christian Campbell / after Jake Eduardo Vermaas / for Julay The circle glows around you every time you first begin. The remembering, kapwa, the circle. I remember “Right On for the Darkness” was

The air in North Carolina demands you to breathe deep, a challenge for the body to stall, the quickness in its blood. There is no rushing here only time birthing more time, there is abundance. A surmounting wealth of space, begging you to see it spread for miles. The dirt caves in ditches in front

Watching Grant paint in twenty-thirteen, and he was asking why food must by limited by cutlery and dishware. I’ve had the answer since the day I ate a bottle of Tylenol. My father bought me the econo-size out of love, and I’ve never repaid him. How much forgiveness can ten dollars buy? I am restive

Your chest is a jug of orange juice,  a gasoline pump,  and this prayer is lazy, just as it should be.  You rise  as if it were for you (and maybe  it is).  Your legs are now the rhinestone in the navel of a belly dancer  as a pair of diamonds watch on,  gaze locked,

Alpheaus L. Parnell, black British R.A.F. pilot, 1943-1946  In war there are two kinds of soldiers, my dad said: those who fight for a paycheck, and those who would rise for a cause. Be very afraid  of the second one—too much to prove. My Jamaica-bred dad swapped crop dusters for Mosquitoes. There was one kind

1 In a tree — a child In a blooming cherry tree — a childin a white gown White on whitein the night —a child, warm from sleep Climb a cherry treesaid the voicein the night All alone in a treein a globe of white Her house on fireshadows flutteringbursts of light, shouts Be with

A feathered lady of a certain age grows spurs one morning, learns to crow where once she only chuckled, head-down, over corn and chicks. She hasn’t laid in months but her human is kind, touched by thinking of her first new egg that the baby rolled in wonder, the memory warmer than the stew her

I sit at a table dodging plates as they whirl top speed around a room. A plate twirler drops wire on my head. My right hand clenches emptiness when I awake. A therapist friend asks about the dream. I tell her first cancer then surgery to excise. Then chemo, then infection, then clot… Another dream

asked, splutters, then gasps, hacks, his hand, index finger held up, a moment, it says, for he can’t catch his breath, is bent over, shoulders, head, neck jerking with the effort, fist at his mouth as if yanking a fishing line, its hook sunk deep in a branch of his wet lungs, his eyes shut tight

I like dipping my hands in the metal bowls of water & making everything I touch holy. Holy forehead, holy chest, holy lips. I am too old to sleep through sermon, too young to listen. Holy pew. Holy basket for offering. My grandmother passes soft mints to busy our mouths. Not busy enough. Holy sweet.

her wrist veins blue, a woman lets go the trapeze bar rubs chalk into her palms wipes chalky palms on her silver sequin leotard • elsewhere a woman keeps breathing / breathing she breathes / breathes into a broken child hit by a hit-and-run • elsewhere a subway rider Jay St. to West 4th grips

A single-celled organism has learned to distill toxins to a slow drip of the one it needs, as how the wolf boy learned to live without human love or language, how the widow lives in loss, cannot throw away the hair in the brush, keeps it in a small lacquered box, how in a house