Poetry

Luminous—the ink you pouraround bullet holesto paint blooms pain turned topetals, terror—tostyle and stigma Ovaries fill withjuice, and we too learn:lives are fragile & can get broken As for life, it says yesAlways—yes No usedenying it

1 On All-You-Can-Eat A sentence is not always a consequence waiting to happen.The edges of the park were yellow-taped from the public.When the first man landed on the moon, I only wanted to gohome. No one listens to the radio after the hurricane makeslandfall. I dreamt of walls papered with ripped bougainvillea.People always say the …

Pelvic bones are nothing like wingsor blades. I know because I saw them in a meadowat Mount Diablo. They must have come from a mother cow,birth canal a wide hollow. I touchedthe wild rye that pulsed inside.*Once, in the desert, my motherand I argued about the shape of the earthuntil I wept. Wind chimes jangled …

I Watching Black Sea sand draw away from your feet the lateness of faith—that teetering while slumped over a phone. That someone of the same hamlet knows little of it, of others of it. A menagerie of pottery shards and sheepskin. That a hermit is to others merely a country: a painting of a woman …

Two poems by Preeti Parikh in an exclusive excerpt from issue 20.2.

A rugged coyote wandered close by the oceanside communities. Tired, it sat beneath a palm tree and took a nap. It dreamed of its former life as a medieval dragon. It had conquered many rustic lands as a fierce dragon. Now, the lonesome coyote hardly ever sang anymore. Most of the city slickers didn’t realize …

It will be better, our friend said,           to just accept that everythingis gone—as though lightening            with that expression the weight of each breathless            click throughout the evening,as on a map we watched            her apartment standing right beyond the fire’s red            line but never crossingin. As if after evacuating            the home, one next empties hope. I …

Outside, the swarm. The dog found it first,ran crying, and now we’re both wearing balaclavasin July. You in mittens, two sweatshirts, some Oakleysfrom God knows where, hands up against the sliding glass.After the poison, the exterminator, still the waspsevery morning. The dog’s face swollen now like a football.In their nest they sleep well, we think. …

after Untitled (Hang iambics), Cy Twombly, 1994 so why not ask that halo of dark whisper for anything, everything: why not write the litany of wax and ash on the first page of the book ofAll My Shortcomings? Haven’t I lived long enoughin the bone hollow, long enough in bonebreak and brakelight?When do I not …