Poetry

your mark on blue-black canvasundertones of summer sunsets &pink peonies & pinã.risk the strokewithout guide or conjurer;this is yours.etch the lines of locs inside outto coiled veins & arteries.let shadowbright crevice your face.allow what arises first to be enough. stare boldly in its eyes syncopated cackle at your reflection.rinse each brushed experiencefully anew –there is …

Some things you can’t prepare for—the widow knows where the important papersare, but her fingers won’t work the lock.And when my mother died, and I stood up,I found for a moment that I couldn’t walk.So it was when I sat beside youin the room for the gravely ill,and though I saw you wanted a sip …

Nothing will come of nothing,which holds true too for the meagerlapels we fashioned from piedand unblinking marigolds, holdstrue even for the snapdragonsyet unready for picking, the goldenraspberries, the wooden basinof straw somebody’d named Music.I looked at you; I thought good thoughts;we debated whether that raptorworlds away with its wingsoutspread was a hawk or a vulture.I …

At nine, māmā wound a leash around my tongue and tugged the meat loose until I spat out syllables, how a spooked dogwould let go of its marred bone. I ironed out my words, slept with a mantle on my tongue, and beat my mouth into submission. Inflections don’t exist in English, a single word …

it replies after I select the department Asian Studies in a dropdown tab, enter the experienceFilipino into the university course search engine.I make mediocre waves of it, I know that single grains of rice that settle far from their plated centre mass get forgotten about, left unspooned, uncelebrated, drowned by the end water of dishwashing …

Dear Su,Today I talked to a teen monk about our age. I wanted to find if there is escape from suffering in what he does: you know, wearing yellow robes, learning Pali chants, skipping dinner, no contact with girls and all. He didn’t know either, but he said the process needs to be carried on …

Dear Su,Funerals have become the only event in my country. Tiny rows of white flags stretch from one pole to the next like the sky’s teardrop strings. This is how we announce a funeral in the community. When the elements turn them yellow, people now let them be as if to mean they can’t do …

A shrug of limbs:gambrel symmetry:a hallway of parkway treesarch filling green middle of May thick:maple, elm, oak.But the ash borerand the city crews:whole blocks reducedto sap splinter chips.The crows black on the grey stainon the branchesat a distanceyammer warntoss syllables:two beats, three beatsfour beatsraw as frictionacross the parking lot.Like felt cut outs, like stencilslike watercolor …

are you my mother?you call a man instead of your mother/ it only makes you miss her more/she called you four times between the hours of nine and two/ perhaps it is better to tell a lie/insist you couldn’t/ hear her rings over the/ unforgiving/ tempo kept by the/ made up /band you said you …

Let my father bea man who loved me poorly which means he loved me.Some stories we tell ourselves when we need to sleep and some we tell whenwe need to stay awake. Both of them may be true. This is the duplicity. But did he love me? This is what I am attemptingto discover. I …