The women’s line snakeslike a weed, the men’s line a stub.Amma & I mutiny, jumpship. We are used to going where we do not belong.All we want is to make an offering,but we are asked to leave this queue. It has always been like this,the priest says, his incensed mundubunching around his waist. And I …
I hope children still learn to sing in rounds, the way we did in music class—not against our will,exactly, but maybe without enthusiasm. Makenew friends, began the first part, because youhad to learn life lessons even from the ornamentsof song, everything taught as a reflection ofhow we were expected to live. One is silver and …
Maybe I’m doing this wrong. Whilethe world skips from tongue to tongue, I’m stuck on the book that holds the oldest language I know, as if a kingkept me close: While everyone else abandoned monarchy, I satdown and stayed put. Even when I was mad atGod, I couldn’t give up the idiom of Hispeople, who …
The swifts speak to the sky likespies tapping out practice code, pushing theair away so the sun might paint their pale forms quinceand rose. They follow constellations of insects threaded amongthe slash pines and the early clouds, intricate and holy as theweavings of some celestial spider. These treesare tall enough to suggest their own kind …
on the bluff of the body shut off ears eyes nostrils and throats and feel on the bluff of the body open the churning heart and let syllables run wild run free in the body that carried in the body about to blurt word words and worlds fell in the pupil of sisterly poetry the …
(To use the PDF embedder to see all pages of the poem, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.) Text: I gather the words like / blooms. / I gather the words. Like shards / of / a missile. I gather the words like / my / grandmother. My grandmother is / shards / …
Here we are in the centerof summer, the middle of alarm,below a sky gone sepiaas fires char and turn skeletalanything they consume, be it forests, be it homes, be it abandoned carson a stretch of road made gauzy by smoke the wind raises, then ferries off.Ash arrives where I reside, stippling. Ash arrives and I …
Miracle how many, and quickly before stopping each and any day: Perhaps more fortunate to be gifted wings, even just one—This oracle fist I carry is the worst of it, never well-defended. Simply not built to be a moat upon a fortress,And more often than not a beam of light manages to delay me by …
Ha, distance. What a song. There’s no such Thing as space from one empty sea and another. Only clocks to wind between states of being—Now, I am; once I was. For instance:Saturdays at the hospital nowhere didn’t smell Like soap gone bad, my father led the way From room to room. We went to see …
After Jose Hernandez Diaz What gave him away was we could both hear an American flag burning. David sat across, his take-a-number ticket poking out from his patch pocket. The blinds were open—we could see the particles sloping between us. He’d been polite enough to listen to all my record-crate schmaltz before asking where I …