Poetry

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 …

It is winter butthe poets are still coming.I once lived in atown where there were no poetsor children. The treeswere made of salt. When the windshook, nothing happenedbut daylight. There were no handssince there was nothing to take.

“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do,” my mom consoles her friend, upset about her son. Both women quit smoking, but we’ve all seen how a lit cigarette can catch like a lost fishhook hungry for flesh. Most wildfires ignite from human oversight, but you can’t blame the mother. In his garage my cousin playing with …

The Museum of Mothers is free on Fridays.I go with Rheim, who is also not a mother, though she carries around a bag of needlesshe bought years ago from an Iraqi woman everyone called Zahra. Rheim gave namesto each of their lean metallic bodies. We start in the sculpture garden, which the curatorshave named Sorry …