He called 911 because he was lonely.
“I don’t have anyone else to talk to,” he said.
The voice on the other end said, “If you call back, you’re going to jail.”
There is a bird that keeps
crashing into your window,
mistaking your desire for sky.
It is the rhythm of the ribs’
hymn returning to itself
Paranoid that my second holes were closing, I called Darryl. First she was a voice on the phone, then she appeared in my bathroom with a needle and ice chips. Through the window, there was green in the sunset. My ears swelled with anticipation.
I have this image of missing snow.
It keeps appearing in the greens of Planet Earth.
In the tropics. In the islands. In the crevice of Equator.
this is not a poem this is a phone call
answer me mid-bite even if you have to spill
your espresso martini over that typewriter
form is a trap since your feelings are facts
For Hélène Bessette, I thought I had looked everywhere.
To the old men au Marché du livre ancien et d’occasion in the 15th,
I said, Auriez-vous des exemplaires d’Hélène Bessette, Collection Blanche Gallimard?
And they scratched their ears, pulled at their collars puis m’ont dit, Pbbt!
On Fridays after teaching, I left the classrooms with a wild hare in my legs.
I wake up at 5:30 to open the shop by 7:00 a.m.—a personal attack. After turning on the lights, I scoop two cups of house roast into a liner and set it to brew. I immediately prepare another liner with Community Coffee; Tim will come in later, like always, wanting a cup of both. Under the sound of a constant drip, I shape the grounds into an anthill.
On Tuesday, November 6, during a presidential election that many consider disastrous, forty-three monkeys escaped from a research facility in Yemassee, South Carolina. A red state, as you probably know.
Before the first yoga moms
and golden chai lattes,
the yellow spice was the love
language of my foremothers.
I am small when my Amma
Ache roots in my back, extends tendrils downward, signals growth
beneath the skin, lesions budding at the surface, indicating B-cell
carcinoma blooming, like my grandma had removed. Small spots,
dimpled and pink, like images online. I’m unable to objectively
evaluate my body for concerning symptoms, but I still try as my
I’m listening to vinyl on a portable turntable that the sculptor brought with her. I’m feeling
young again because we’re spinning Adam and the Ants: still desperate, still not serious.
I’m telling the historian who studies settler colonialism about those hormonal, vintage,
wild days when Duran Duran played saxophone on a sailboat, flipped furniture over,
and hunted a woman who went quadruped and grease-painted in an indigenous rainforest.
Summer. Bridgeport Park.
There are two. Jill, my pelo chino pup & Sam,
a user-friendly pug. A perfect mix of rug
& hearth, innocent/not yet marked. There are
no boundaries. Downhill, a man, grey hair
stretching towards his ass asks about the
On the other side of the ocean
I’ve seen a tree like this before
She is singing in your room
Where was it?
The song:
We’re in homeroom, and Jessica St. Clair and Her Bossy Brigade got it all wrong. I am not “livin’ in a car.”
For example, today. After school, I go to the library, do my homework on a computer. Print it out then browse for graphic novels before walking to State Street. Duck into Fairchild Coffee for a hot cocoa. That’s where I eat the ham and cheese sandwich from Decca’s lunch. Decca gives me her sandwiches when she’s on her gummy diet.
Air-conditioning, bless
borscht, bougainvillea, breeze block candelabra aloe, cabazon
dinosaurs (there’s Desert Shit embroidered on your new cap)
electrolytes and eye drops (two truths no lies)
Somewhere on the genome was a gene for cowlick, and that would be her first choice for gene therapy, just edit it out. Marcy sketched a double helix next to the cartoon she was working on and expanded it into a pouty face with the helix for a nose and the words gene and therapy as loopy earrings. She added a cowlick and was drawing an eye when she snapped the lead off her pencil. “Oh shit.”
“Swear jar.” Her son, Bruce, didn’t look up from playing with her calculator.
I always thought I’d die a cinematic death,
splayed on a vast expanse of fresh snowfall
that glints back a million stars of sunlight
while a thin trickle of blood blossoms and spreads
like the folds of my red, velvet skirt.
I wish I’d kept more to myself
rather than laying it all out
on whatever surface was offered
like if I could just show you,
if I could just explain—
Lana had long been in the habit of reading Terry’s mail, particularly at Christmas when the cards came. She never made a secret of it, and he never complained, even when he found the envelopes slit along their pale white throats, splayed like rash feathers against the green felt of his desk. Terry didn’t like to be bothered with details—bank statements, charity requests, formal correspondence. He trusted Lana, in fact, to take care of all such customaries, all but the sentimental things, for which no particular action was required. If the envelope was empty, a small sigh invariably escaped his lips. Done! he thought, satisfied, as though he had done it himself, and tossed the thin, paper sheaf into the drawer.
I speak no Arabic, only a bit of French. They speak no English.
We crowd into the small bathroom to wait for a toilet, two young women before me, coiffed and polished, their eyes lined black with a calligrapher’s precision. Soft lashes, velvety blush, and foundation blended with an artist’s hand. Hijabs pinned and draped just so. Layers of beaded satin flow around their slight frames, one indigo, the other violet. Lips stained rose. Eyes like a fawn’s.
around here there’s talk of ‘the big one’
not as in if but when the waves at last
are thrown from their shore’s caress
by earth-shatter only to come crashing
back, regurgitative, clearing miles of coast
Who named you “Khadija?”
When Jason tried to spell out your name,
he choked on the first letter
and could only finish the rest with backslaps.
Mustafa was too scared.
Said your name was a swarm of drones.
I turned twenty-five and it was summer.
I thought my vocabulary
for death had stopped growing
but it bloomed a deluge of honeysuckles
in my room. The war we had
thought would end, did not end.
The ilium is the largest bone in the pelvic girdle.
Its crest is what my lover holds
sometimes like a steering wheel
patiently pushing pleasure forward.
When I wear a tight belt around my
waist my mother sees what all my lovers
do.
My soul is tied up to an old column.
I recall, in the slumber of the night,
its stone history.
I run my hand over the fossilisation of time
on its cold body.
My hand collides with its protrusions.
He hears of war and inflation
speculation and high prices
The world shattered like a pomegranate
its grains blood-red
This pain isn’t us,
Always mine, and never yours
I’m pained that you’re not here
I’m the pain in your nothingness
we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish
water has never been older
we return to the rites
rather than remember to
escape from the moments that cannot
catch our breath
One might wish
to figure out
the measure of the sure,
the doubt.
The pleasure of
an hour’s space.
I am hungry for a language
from the mouth of a foreign country
where sound is a fountain I drink from
in small increments.
Where the word for flowers melt
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
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