no one can remember who
bought this mug, or if it belonged
to a larger set, which got lost along
some move or broken in some forgotten
box—maybe in the basement or the attic? [. . .]
I meet a girl who is an alien for Halloween, which is the secret queer costume of the decade; she wears it in green sparkles and two antennae launching from her hair. I am trying to tell if she is straight, and also, to be sexy, so I ask,
what is your favorite emoji? . . .
I get home and my kids ask me to explain simple things: Why don’t humans lay eggs? Will it ever snow? Do people stop loving you because you’re far away? They’ve taped a sheet of paper to the wall, to keep a tally of all the mosquitos they killed since we arrived. . .
There he was carrying a tray of bygone at a San Francisco Hilton. Surrogate for husband #1. Food services manager, not engineer. . .
Astrologers say this moon in Scorpio is where we welcome the death of an old life, an old identity, old ways of being. It’s letting ourselves be reborn […]
My father did not fight in Vietnam, as he was a young scholar with a family Until he left home one day without explanation, exiled himself from doing harm.[…]
How to let people know I love them without reminding them I’m real. Am I real? Would it be better if I was real? How many times can a real person say “I love you” before someone gets annoyed and straight-up murders them?[…]
In Theology, I learned Jesus called his father Abba, and passed because it’s the name I call my own—who feared that I would leave Friday Mass half-faithful, forgetful of the place where I learned how to be hated.[…]
trust me when I say I am not you. I do not know who you are, your likes & dislikes, why you care about this-that, him-her, why you cried or hours on end over at Krakow, burying yourself in the chest of a room I can’t recall[…]
the dying Italian mother of seven
raps the ceiling with a wood cane
as we make love in silence—no
less eager than a mother scolding
I knew for a decade just one way to die the one that took my uncle, my cousin, all the kids from my high school who didn’t leave town.[…]
not subtlety, and at sundown begin moaning. The veterinarians act more veterinarianly. It must be internal damage. It must be the liver rupturing. Yes, the liver. And that is how these prognoses tend. Diagnosis being […]
Poets are just whisperers, whispering the rose verse, Weaving words as a curse. They wander the groves In order to find doves. They wander the meadows, So they find adagios. They wander the streams, To find the crowns of queens. Poets are just whisperers, Who their lament makes ornate.[…]
your island, before storms and faces crashed on your shores with new names for death and stolen lands, whips and dark nights, histories of ancestors piled in the hulls of ships[…]
The auction block still rides on the black backs of ghosts hurling themselves town to town […]
The chapped lips of last season’s flora, the winter-cracked cattails slowly recovering their limber. Today I saw a willow precisely […]
I want our childhood back to watch the ice break off at the shoreline and float away when the sun begins to warm the waters of Lake Superior early spring. Or spend whole Saturdays planting the pink and purple candy-striped petunias you loved in flower boxes and along the borders of our little sidewalk. […]
Everyday the author takes the bus like a distant hum, I love that. I love that somebody leaves the author a voicemail and doesn’t talk about pain as a thin golden feather. I love that the author calls back.[…]
Two boys pull green oranges from the tree
that hangs over the churchyard fence. They
throw them into the street with such auto-
matic skill that they may be the same boys
sent to kill in any war that will never be theirs […]
With Cleopatra eyes and Sadé skin her words sting clear as Noxema lather:
“Mom, I’m not pretty,” she confesses. “What?” I accuse—“What do you mean,”
I spit and sputter, my mind scrambling to organize an understanding
of this violence she commits against herself […]
I almost see myself trip and shatter
us both on the stairs. I almost see
my arms slip and tumble you over
the balcony to crack on the sidewalk
below […]
The Shekhinah Some say the Shekhinah is the queen of presence, pulsing upward through the living earth, bidding us to bloom in our skins. The apple orchard in full blossom. But when you see me, I am a burning flame, blonde hair billowing behind. You have no throne festooned with ribbons, no needle to embroider my […]
The children pick the peeling yellow paint from the bathroom pipes and lick it while Mama is gabbing on the phone with her sister. Papa returns from work at four and takes the yellow plastic strap out of the second dresser drawer and whips their thighs since Mama has delegated punishment for their transgressions during […]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
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Photo credit: Rakia Khalid
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