Articles

University Hero was having a hard time making up his mind.
And Office Girl, well. In between bouts of extreme productivity—for instance, powerwashing the whole roof, reorganizing everyone’s offices alphabetically and by color, creating an original strand of wheat, and running marathons—

Twitterland had 300 million registered citizens in 2016. Think of it as a country: it’d be bigger than Indonesia, Japan, and Pakistan. A country that knows no borders, a nation of millions of citizens staring emptily at their screens, scrolling their lives away.

“On the day that you were born,” Mom said, “your dad nicknamed you peacock. Your hair stood straight up. Because of your two cowlicks.” She swirled her fingers like a stir stick in coffee, pointing to the crown of my head.

Say burgundy, mauve, off-purple range
estranged, the pink remorse that timed
the cloth store I created there
its wild forlorn, the need for open

Don’t get me wrong.
I’m a modest girl, couldn’t even strip off
at one of those nudie hot springs out west,
the whole place a flotsam
of much-nursed areolas and buoyant

Years after I left, the bees began
to build in the places I used to fill
with the syrup of my anger—
ten thousand bees performing

This time is sacred for the good or bad 
it could become but isn’t yet. For the phone 
that doesn’t ring but might. 
Ma nishtana ha-laila

All the flies in the valley were buzzing at the windows, wingflits
fizzing the afternoon bright as sparkling water. As they
were our only neighbors, we climbed the loft ladder clothed
and descended it naked, proud not to have clocked our heads

Naked on the front porch, the moon unfurling its light
as though for a picnic, our yard is silver
and set for feasting.

There’s no record of the figs,
familiar in their plum-like, seedy luster.

I thought if I found the right one I could heal
my cousin’s sty. Just a hotel lobby