Poetry

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 …

a golden shovel / after Against Me! All I ever wanted to be—the summerdaydreamed of. Girl in the floral-print dress& endless golden fields. I just wanted youto future me, when so many people wantme past-tensed. I know I can’t convince themI deserve survival. A future togrow up into. I know that they can’t seea girl’s …

stares down head and claw on the tableto make something whole again. Perhaps she’s unnerved by the prospect, deathback to life. But that we crave not just intact but true is the first wish as whenan old mount from the ’30s is taken out of the standard formal pose-of-that-day, itsupright-for-eternity habit of ninety years, its …