Poetry

At the beach where the Atlantic kisses our feet, my daughter asks me what the ocean will bring to the shore, like it has secrets it has held on to. I say under my breath, probably slaves and I know this is me at my most cynical, a trait my child shouldn’t need to be […]

Forever as if she and I are contesting who’s the more hurt— the one who recalls, or the one who goes blank. Flat fronts of goldenrod robes as we girls soprano-ed for pews of men. Explosion when the neigh- bor boys were paid once to watch us (sweat pouring in mud eyes)—games with chairs, red […]

I began my life as a baby but we won’t begin there. You don’t want the fear to be over-determined. There is a presence absence issue. Stuck with or pushed against silence. The silence around events. The dove event. The raptor event. I have regrets. They are all over me like the weather. Guilt not […]

There was a decade I never had a status The fall fell down on me Like a bangle in the rain I thought it might be dignified To sleep inside a coffin When fever came I held it like a bell Sometimes I still ring it When I want to find my pain

We ate burgers bloody, buns toasted in grease & where teeth split the meat, red dribbled down our chins onto the grass. August & the ghost moon shone w/out the sun having set. Bees pummeled my head so I’d get up & run, sit down again, slather butter on corn, get up, circle & duck, […]

!50! Such greenness—the lawn! Bent-back blades & dewdrop sequins stitched in sequence replicate !100! the fly’s eye tweed of my dress. !50! Here I am, mama, amplified the way you always wished. Lawnmower ripcord starts up, !100! the kind that tugs gasoline-rich !100! the kind that swipes off toes, like when cousin Linus !50! sprinkled […]

At customs, I declare myself !100! dead. The agents coffin me !50! immediately, don’t want a detectable odor. Metal detectors !100! were invented in the 19th century by a white doctor who wanted !50! to locate bullets in other people’s bodies. The irony being his people put them there !100! in the first place, I […]

My grandmother was born in a city called [宜兰] Despite its name, no orchids grow there Five of my six aunts have names ending in [兰] My mother’s full name is [little wind] Orchid seeds are distributed by land, water, & wind One of my aunts drowned in a river I invented from rain One […]