The Pilgrims
I HEARD THE FLIES BUZZ TWICE IN MY LIFE, ONCE OVER THE DEAD BODY ON THE RIVERSIDE, AND ONCE…
art vs. blowjobs & on kindness
our wanderings conjure desire, the selfish kind—hunger
to ask for more without bothering to hear the answer.
If the World Ends
What if it came crashing down, I thought. What if it fell like a blanket and smothered us all.
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.
The Kids That Look Like Me Keep Dying
Leaning bicycles on old iron fences.
The kids grow out their bowl cuts.
The merry-go-round weeps
behind the Baptist church.
Roots
Two Saturdays after Joe and I get married and buy a house in the Upper Ninth Ward, a…
The Drive South
When the waitress left, Kate locked eyes with Jase and said rather than asked, “What if they don’t let us into his room at the hospital.”
This is Here and All Over
It starts with a crocodile. With a woman, with an awning. A touch and a touch. It starts like everything starts, you think.
Herpetology
Stevie and I fed the alligator in the lake behind the bowling alley on our lunch break. Not directly. We weren’t idiots. We left expired hamburger and piles of fat scrapped off the Snack Shop grill on a special rock at the edge of the water, farthest from the dock.
Attica Prison Rebellion in Three Poems
“If he says no, I’m dead.” Hard words from a hard man to the governor.
Granada, The Parable of the Woods, & Saint Sebastian
the fruit stains a woman’s fingers.
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.
Waves Like Constellations
Later, when I gasped his name it sounded strange in the air, like a phone ringing in a home you know to be long emptied of anyone.
The Diaspora of Your Voice & The Revolution of a Hand at Your Back
The diaspora of your voice is hatched from the space you refuse to continue drowning in
Raptor Ready
Red-tails are not rare—they nest in the trash trees on the limestone cliffs of Interstate 440. But wherever or whenever I see one,
normal life
stops.
Man with Birds & The Astrologers of Life
after Rufino Tamayo’s Hombre con pájaros, 1945 & Los astrόlogos de la vida, 1947
Thunderstorm & An Apology for Those Who Use Latin Midsentence
Tonight, we inhale combustion / quilted with orange residues / that leak from solitary bulbs.
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.
FLYOVERLAND
It’s for your own good, she says. Otherwise you’ll bake like a pork tenderloin.
Or does she call me a pork tenderloin? Or maybe what she says is,
Are you hungry yet? Dinner’s getting cold. If you don’t eat your pork tenderloin,
he will.