Poetry
Deep into the kitchen’s gut, the street tides back the unhooked warning: do not let him become your memory of the city. By which I remember how a man can take and take until a woman shreds to splinter. For my carelessness, I wait for some curse: a flash and zap, or my toes […]
My twin splits a worm, chipped spade crude knife. !10!!10! Will either half survive he asks before I move !25! to another state, a dorm, a roommate who is not !10!!10! blood. Not even a worm knows what it’s like to live !10!!5! apart. The firmer he presses, the faster it writhes; how !25!!10!!5! the […]
First, to write the name of !100!!50!!25!!5!the pen’s bank !200!!50!!25!!5!on a loan !50!!25!application at another bank, to scribble out the name !50!!25!!10!of a thing !50!!25!!10!or a friend upon !25!!10!!10!which rests a precipice !25!to write out a preposition, to stockpile words in a word bank to with- !10!!5!draw from over !100!!25!the course of being !25!!10!!10!a language […]
They made Eve an event, a teleology we’ve teethed too many mouths upon, jawing uneven through supposed apple skin. We’ve seeded and ceded enough. Enough gnawing on our bones by canonized men. Let fang become fallout, reverse this ache, this sorry. Let bees shimmer inside our eyes instead of men’s glory. Let’s mouth a modern […]
Fingering the flesh wounds, fumbling, false starts assail you. It’s autumn. All we invent is another ending. Yellow singes orange scraping the blistered rage. That old palette of ruby and rust. You said no, he said yes. Your voice weighed less. But it stayed, darkening the curtains of that house where each room’s a contusion built of disillusion. […]
The sound of wind but no real wind, and me screwing and unscrewing an aspirin bottle cap for as long as it took us to hit the border. Still going. Green bruises on the horizon like a coming tornado. Then, crabapples strewn over the gravel. How I could feel them bursting underneath but all I […]
Glass of a thousand sands. Glass that lets us see right through it. I never wanted that kind of melting. 3,200 degrees, sunlike, thin, a sudden rooting inward. You never get to come back from that system. I wanted to be terrestrial, yielding as a handful of sand—colorless brain an abacus. It should be easy, […]
Seeking an ancestral cipher against the grim statistics of racial math, we bypassed the palm-reader seated under the adjacent tent. I want to say that her dreadlocks, studded with the cowries she would cast for us, brushed the ground like a cape. She knew your baby brother would turn vegan then baker; that I would […]