Poetry

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was always our tax status. There’s no lovein money. Sometimes there’s no love in love.Sometimes love is a fish-gillslit in your heart through which you learnto breathe. That’s how it was.When I found the long silver hooksof another woman’s earringsin his bathroom drawer, I raisedan eyebrow. I said, “Oh.” Sometimesa waterspout rises from the lake …

grandma unfolds her dress, & 1967 patternsinto life, its story mapped in provinces, infamilies splayed naked on a dusking weave. The dressis handsewn, seaming bound by restitching. Lilac & rhubarbthreads haphazard & layer threefold along the waistlike fingers of smoke. Mesmerizing, because a dying fireis a spectacle. The dress of a hometown documentingevery small violence. …

title from Hippocrates, translated by David Hayden Camden my body wants a babydespite the circumstances, the ramen at the kitchen sink at midnight,the bargain-bin fruit, jelly-soft and splitting, the amex too sharpat the register, drawing blood.the whole world is having a baby. my cousin is having a baby,any day now, gray and grainy on the …

Operating as a gesture for containment: tongue and serpentine, exceptionally placed. I opened up my home. The article, a dash instead of O— A girl was shot uphill. Her gesturingMy light. That much I knew of operational intelligence, the centralizing articles for love. You walked into my home. You drank up all my water and …

In my childhood insects leave pieces of themselves everywhere Spherical eggs on a leaf Moth cocoon with exit hole (Papery and brown) The papery circles of a wasps’ nest Architecture held by athin stem Webs Dense as cotton wads Spread like an elegant hand Ripped Or holding drops of water A cicada skin with a …

but the Venn diagram is a perfect circle.I poke my neck through the hole of comparison like a hula-hoop hoping, under no circumstance, that it ever cuts as closeas the collar of the dress shirt hanging in my closet feeding moths a feast in lean times.It is the dead center of summer. We are centering …

Inner Sunset San Francisco 2019I would be ashamed to die this way: monarch pinned to his back seat, ashamed for my last light to be this tapering August, this avenue pressing through the fog of the blindfold the man’s fashionedto keep me unseeing. The turn down Frederick: streetlights, morepins, I feel them prick my skin. …

(To see the poem in its ideal orientation, use the circular arrow on the top to rotate counterclockwise. The scrollbar on the right can also help you navigate to all pages of the poem.) Text: how do women, how do women . . . ?you know, with no / lead their lives / clasp together …

Ants push god aside, emerging from their many tunnelsin what we term a “colony” while they don’t—taking umbrage,though having the grace to keep to their purpose, concomitantwith god emergent manifold and compelled across interlinkedtunnels with those mouths out of a constellation of gravel.Over the hill, many different ant IDs cross lines of forage,and traces of …