Poetry

then you did the unthinkable. ran from the burning pyre, shed off your old self like a snake. vowed to want to live again, and never flirt with hell. wiggled yourself into spaces small enough to swallow you. your back then folded, bowed, but still a bone. executed mental somersaults, threw yourself like bird after …

In my field journal about rocks for my seventh grade biology teacher, I write: You know Georgia peaches. Plump and juicy. And some more hairy than others. Well, today, I went peach picking with my family. We got some really nice ones. I slice open one to find a dancing worm. My body jerked, but …

& God said, “love your enemy,” & I obeyed him & loved myself. Kahlil Gibran because this mess i made i made with both hands. because the loneliness of astronauts was too much to bear, i guzzled entire bodies, mouths like wounds i’d drain & ditch down a storm pipe. because when you know you’ll …

pocks on the motherworts. gray-green, white- green, dogeared. no one volunteers to be ill, you say. and i the heart alone sustains us. above the light in cowlicks slips between our sundown’s favored trees. coming around inspiration point’s eastern face, one last mile, we traipse the odd gap-toothed bridges designed to break the ankles of …

If you comb your hair at night, you will lose your memory. i don’t remember which came first, the alzheimer’s or the alopecia. my grandpa lying on our couch– moonlight pooling between clumps of curls like rain falling through a tattered canopy– his sentences cobbled together like the bones of an animal they say once …

“Recognition is the misrecognition you can bear.” – Lauren Berlant “It ain’t only the bad ones nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.” – James Baldwin There wasn’t a funeral. His sun-stricken eyes never felt cool relief under red dirt or earth embrace. His bones have surely bleached under the gaping Connecticut sky. …

Why do you pretend to be stone, wind, bird? – A. AJMÁTOVA ONE STANDS STILL while another takes flight, each according to their nature, I understand stones and birds. Even the elusive owl. If I grew a stem, roots, leaves if I sunk in the water, without breathing but without dying if I were born …

Sir Francis Drake great great ringing of alarm bells firing of cannons a singed odor in the courtyard of English attack dogs as they came the windows of shameful tortures red-hot irons merchant of terror the business of pirates that hidden village with so lucrative a fortune mad ideas over three hundred years of that …

As you talk, it seems that a lily strolling in your voice Talk to me I want to hear you You were the gardener of your voice And your laughter a flock of white doves that fly at once I love you like adhan at dawn like the road that leads to sleep I love …

Marianne von Willemer to Goethe, circa 1816 I sent one to you while you were at work— as if an artichoke could make a wife of me—a thistle for your fork, Cynara cardunculus, after a quick dip in olive oil and lemon. “Poison,” you once wrote, was not some Secret Thief, but “the intensity of …