Mating Call
Bigfoot has been feeling lonely lately, wondering – self-indulgently, masochistically – what the plural of Bigfoot would even be. Bigfoots? Bigfeet?
It’s purely hypothetical. There are no others out there.
Blood Brother
Scoutmaster Justin’s on the pier, leg on a post, balls hanging out of his cut-off shorts like that guy on the Fleetwood Mac album. He has to feel that, has to know he’s flashing the ten of us treading water below. “Dive!” he shouts, all Full Metal Jacket, blows and blows his pink plastic whistle. “It’s cold as hell down there! Watch the cottonmouth nests!”
field son finds a way to make it on this earth
down the throat spill into the hungry stomachs of youth. /
blue recycle bins knock over. an attempt to survive this /
summer means every black body for itself.
The International Congress for Kids Whose Dads Are Commie Draft Dodgers
Rick calls meeting to order by pounding his shoe on the upside-down waste paper basket we use as a podium like the President of the Communists did on TV once.
Bottomless Sounds
A woman I haven’t seen before walks through the door and demands my attention. She is taller than a medium-sized person. She is a lioness. A redheaded delight. Her lips take up her entire face. They’re red and I want to kiss them, bite them, and stick them in the pocket of my jeans.
Dear David
When dolphins die they call out their own name. They do this to make sure their family is close––they do this to remind their near ones: this is who I am. I am here now. I have known joy.
My Mother, the Moon
I remember thinking her head looked like the moon: covered in bumps and divots. I wanted to explore the topography of her scalp, but instead I clenched my hands into fists at my sides until my fingernails left half-crescent indents on my palms.
Three Poems by Emily Paige Wilson
As in dead, a completed action, not / the slow lingering of life lengthening / towards death. I mean the death itself: / vibrant as a moth’s wing, excited /as forgetting.
All of Us Animals
Boys everywhere—actors, singers, models—bodies hairless and hips slim, leaned against palm trees. A thousand gazes follow us always.
Hineni
The night of my parents’ funeral, she told me that the most important thing you can tell people, dead or alive, is that you are here. On this earth.
Through the Veil of Her Hair
You marry the dead girl. She is a scarecrow in a white dress, only the smallest bone of her pinky finger woven into the straw and wood holding her together in effigy. The rest of her has gone into the air as smoke and ashes.
Twenty Hard Things About Being Married to a White Man
If he spent years studying some aspect of what you think of as “your” culture, he won’t waste time arguing with you about whether it’s really your culture, or whether you know enough about it. Instead he’ll make clothing suggestions––sarongs, saris, dashikis, dreads, natural hair instead of extensions––and he’ll study you.