In a bed/ in an ink-wash of night sky/ a Chagall dreamer rises/ An omniscient moon/ hovers above the pines…
While mowing the lawn, a small bird flew into my chest and stuck there. It’s America. I can’t afford health insurance…
You asked me once at dawn about forgiveness and I said
I didn’t think you had any need to be forgiven and you said
nothing…
On the first day there was stillness. For a moment nothing moved. The wind held its breath. The birds stopped in midflight—their wings pinned against the blurry space of sky.
Woman, where is your crown? Why do you stand there dumb-founded? It does not abide in the swivel of your hips or the bouncing of your breasts!
It keeps showing up like a complaint no one has answered for…
Since it happened, Beverly has been able to talk and think only in imprecise terms. She’s said there was an accident and the baby is gone, but on the third day she wakes up and the first thing in her head is the baby is dead, and this, finally, is something real she can taste in the back of her throat…
Casting off the fashions of those finders who refined their finery too far in passion’s fire, and reining in my own too-fond desire, I’ll tell the truth of what I’ve found in you…
Dawn calls the haenyo. They return to the shore, the soles of their feet worn smooth. They listen for the ripples of pearls and urchins, sing the sun from darkness…
In painting my memories, I turn them into fortune-telling cards—my own deck of cards, for my own type of reading…
I stand with my back to the bus shelter, my coat hunched over my shoulder just an inch more so my nape won’t be exposed.
and I know you will not listen, you are like the cupboard,
but please forgive, yet again, my shredding, indefinite removal…
When I am three years old, I feel the burn of a cigarette on my arm…
In summer, Gram lazily waves at me with the flyswatter while Gramp chain-smokes Swisher Sweets in his underwear, wrestling always playing on the heavy wooden-entombed TV…
3:48am Sleepless. Not just for a string of nights, but for several months. Is this what dying feels like?
The anarchists must be somewhere says the orange man in the sun hat…
My niece clutches the kitchen doorjamb, her brown eyes wide. Her face is streaked with something dark—mud, dirt, ash. Her thin hair is flyaway, thin, uncombed. “There’s monsters in the bushes…”
I’ve found you Imposter Erect against the araceae backdrop Stealing your neighbour’s hue…
My mother moved in with me once icicles began to form like claws on my fingertips…
My earth mother told me to rub cocoa butter on my gray winter legs, and never fake bake with UV rays…
Tap into your Southern blood and blame Obama: A black president. A black nerd president. Anything is possible. These days, alien-space-Vikings seem as unreal as the Middle Passage…
This is a story about a pair of red ankle-strap shoes. High heels, of course, high heels that give the longest legs to even the shortest of girls—in this case, an Italian girl who stood just a little short of five feet tall, in the Jersey City of 1942…
Frankie and I protect our town, on the scoreboard and at the town fair, still wearing our jerseys, proud of our colors…
Tonight she’s in a park, sprawled out on her back under the shelter of a scratched-up willow tree…
My work is a reflection of past cultures, distorted by a mirror of aged antiquity, seen through a haze of modern neon lights…
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