Poetry

Add water from the tap — one cup — Who knows what recipes You’ve found, Chilling the water or heating it up. Wen shui is fine, just right. Add it to the flour, stir to make dough. You’ll need more strength than that to knead a dumpling pi that holds up to steam and soup …

We are baking a cake and nothing is wrong I do not have a pit in my stomach Lina comes in licks chocolate icing off the side of your hand I am unfazed in fact, the evening is still entirely ours you’re wearing your dead mother’s checkered apron, and we talk until our words drift …

ugly as the day I was born I carry my girlhood like an apology scraping dead selves off the soles of my feet onto the pavement onto the organic produce at Whole Foods onto my lover’s best pillowcases a sorry sight elsewhere a perfect specimen soft spoken unstained underwear graceful even in death my god …

H E ain’t coming back tonight. Next night neither. You hear your marrow cresting its cricks & miss what you never thought you’d miss: him snoring through midnight, uvula clocking its knocker on his throat’s narrow door. The hogs housed in his hothouse mouth—whose truffle they rootin’ now? You collage women in your sleep: knees …

At the apex of night, limbs splayed across the too-small bed, I allow my hands to wander towards the heat of my cunt, desire sharp and pulsing. Beneath the shawl of darkness, I shape my flesh like a block of clay, all its excess overflowing onto the sheets. The smooth flat landscape of my chest …

I was a youth. That could mean anything. A yearling, lion-colored, rippled hills, or black bristling my lip. When you took the knife, I became very still. Thought and wonder peeled away like burnt bark, raw underneath. A pair of eyes just seeing, and breath, and a pulse– Inside my death the possible permanence of …

I visited the arboretum in Arcadia for a date. A peacock honks as if it knows I should’ve stayed home. The day before I got my shin tattooed with a vase. I always end up with flowers on new work because as a kid my mother would take me to pick up potted, red chrysanthemum …

—Genesis 29:20 And he watered her flock and kissed her mouth, וַיַּ֕שְׁקְ wayashq and וַיִּשַּׁ֥ק wayishaq, binding care with the carnal, their muzzles warm beneath his tending hands, her mouth bright as the nectar of pomegranates. Desideratum is a word for something wanted or needed, whose root means both “to find a lack of” and …

Every morning of my first year, my mother’s father drove over at dawn to bathe me and walk with me among trees, touching my tiny fingers to things as he named them, saying, bark, saying, web, saying, air and grandfather and granddaughter, all to say, Welcome; I have waited so long for you. At a …

God, we spend our whole / lives persevering / long winter stars scalding / us / as if heaven’s a place / real as the corner diner / alight all night / where I enter easily even as a sinner / hungering for eggs / over easy & devour them. / Let’s cover this early …