Poetry

This is the honor my parents gave me: to be so common among my generation that from kindergarten through PhD, teachers qualified me with a final initial. No one recalls why my family broke from their biblical, saintly taxonomy—Deborah, Theresa, Mary—to baptize mein such a quotidian font, to opt for what was popular. What I …

I think we called itBonner’s Hill or Bonner’s Mile because it seemed that long and he used to live therethough he died by the time we were old enough for the dirt bikes we pedaled to maximum speedbefore the tuck and float all the way down helmetlessdodging potholes and loose gravel at the riverbendwhere they …

Before you shot yourself in the chest I had forgotten you. Visiting here after twenty-five years, false claimant of homeland,I’m pocketing columbine seeds from the library garden.How like me to make this about me. Your motherin the grocery store moving slow and hunched among the frozen dinners. The joker you dated in high school—was I …

As in accidental death and dismemberment, as in the insurance policy the Idaho StateJournal took out on me, their newest paperboy, including a number I could dial if I losta limb. I carried disaster like a rabbit’s foot.Suppose a neighbor’s stray arrow took out my eye, $5,000. Suppose Old LadyAllsop tripped while mowing and her …

It’s impossible to feed you when I can’t findyour mouth, an inconvenience when you levitateor pass through walls. How to coax a whale on the beach back into water. How to rescue a jellyfishwithout becoming one.Forget what you learned in school about silence and standing still, abouthow a cricket is just a cockroach that sings.When …

Is there other life? I stare out my shower’s window, through Orion’s polygonal window into deeper void.And do they have something like ass hairthat they hate on themselves and scrape away? My milky way of blood and cream swirls down the drain. I lie downhuman and smooth for just myself and this psychedelic gummy cube …

You alter the path once and once the children see the shadows in the alcove under the school’s front steps, the bars, the down-white plumage, the herb-green feathering, you walk closer to peer into the aviary at the parrots and parakeets. “Hello,” you said, and the birds said nothing. “Hello,” the children said in their …

You look under the low tent sheltering from the sun, the compromise in showing them, the best way to protect the color is to keep them covered, as if under the surface of the dry, sandy dirt as they were before excavation. The pigmented stones, none of them larger than a tooth, and the picture …

The performance over and the crowd’s dispersal into the dark, rain sheened, winter streets. We among them in the amber glow of streetlights, our silhouettes across the cobblestones, elongated and elegant. The restaurant we chose at a late hour, the server’s affectionate confidence, leading us with her hand, her Madame et monsieur, pleased to have …

“What, for example, is born in England, but is never, not even on a cloudy day, English?” —Bhanu Kapil You must liveIn the footnotes of a one-drop rule. Or blood quantum. Remember, Never both. You must pull out Your heartIn exchange for a card. Antithesis To citizenship. SpitAt the border or they will send troops …