In a Dream I Speak Perfect Mandarin
vague shape of a person, perhaps made up
of broken seashells : the sound of fractured edges toned
Domestic Realism
my mother married a willow tree on a hilltop, sat under its boughs through four decades of rain in a day
Corsage
Sideways glances at others who are doing it better: crisp black ties, polish on their shoes, the right moves.
anti-ode to the heart
cocoons, tent worms eating the world
just to be reborn, inseparable from the smoke
Two Poems
The past is an animal with its teeth bared.
ON WORLDBUILDING
and she’ll never die, and we won’t either.
Your DNA Results Are In & the Researchers Send Their Condolences
you have a mother, but you do not have a mother. / we can see that on the tests.
EARL
Nothing / about my grandfather was soft, // though he planted fruit trees / in improbable climates.
Supermarket Horse
Listen to the palpitating of this horse / heart and I will answer in the language // underneath this skin.
Deer Lord / Dear Lord
The boys have never seen him, don’t believe he’s real, but the girls all whisper about the latest boogeyman, the Deer Lord they see outside their bedroom windows at night; the deer who wears a human skull over his own face.
The Burial of a Woman Known as China Mary
Once, I offered pieces of myself to every
man—my hands, my coins, my words—
my true self is grocery shopping
I don’t own a cheese grater.
capitalism makes this okay.
After Eva Hesse’s Tomorrow’s Apples
And, too, the minding of where to step – the one rotten apple
in the shade with the bees feasting.
Ophelia in the Badlands
In my history, I was the prettiest girl
in town who was seduced
by the summer eclipse or the hellion who stole the keys
of Daddy’s 1958 Impala
Dreambaby as tattoo artist
Her many-boned arm comes out and
there in her hand is a tattoo gun, already
buzzing and dripping ink.
The Thing with Feathers
Hope is a naked goose that made a wrong turn somewhere.
You Swallow a Super Moon and a Doctor You Have Never Met Prescribes Prednisone
Last week I / courted the moon from a stop sign.
cleanliness, (un)godliness
we were plunged into the river / and made holy the pale man
Forbidden Birth
I found you bitty in a snap pea, plucked you out and swallowed you whole, / rivered your body through my insides and grew it quietly. What bad men? we say.
like every good yellow catholic woman, i plan my funeral 60 years in advance
and on the eighth day, my grandfather’s church organ fell down heaven’s / winding staircase & became a persimmon tree the size of my fist.
Nargis
Nargis hits and we belch out thought and memory. / Overturned electric lines crackle with teeth.
chordata
we teach ourselves to crack without spilling over / the egg before it does not hatch
to say i want to take a big glorious shit,
the kind that stinks like shit & empties you. to say i can’t, for whatever reason, take this shit, but for days now have felt like i need to.
Sappho and Sappho and I, Sappho
I eat paintings the way a woman eats bibles — in the back corners of used book stores, the cracked leather and faux gilt burn her
Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s, new research finds
You say the earth is mad.
GirlGod
My favorite iteration of God is 12-year-old GirlGod —
God of watermelon bubblegum and Dr. Pepper LipSmackers. Of hologram stickers and locked diaries. GirlGod of 1994.
you won’t come back
to that creek with the sluggish / brown water that swells up each / spring and recedes as if sipped / from old bags of toilet wine God / won't find you in the cornfields
mothman fucks me from behind
sing, the guttural & saccharine / taxonomy of shame: what want demands / the body forgives
Stand Her Ground
his gun // memory of steel bars // the plea // his gun // her self-defense // his reaction // her end // his gun // any being cornered will fight back // & her teeth already dull from repeated use
Two Poems by Tomas Moniz
the world works in broken &
imperfect circles like arms hugging a baby’s toothless smile the way a dog spins around & around before sleeping the word moon sung by nick drake the soft & rounded edges of the adobe home
The Wet Body
Returning the whale was soso still It did not complain when I crawled inside with my one can and my no candle The mouth the humid mouth was like a tunnel of warm sponge I thought A whale is smaller from the inside I thought This is what my heart would look like from the middle
The Second Coming of Mary
The body is gone. / But the shape of gravity is known. We carry her, /
like a folded jacket of spirit, laying in our arms.
Five Untitled Poems
You learned to spill by breathing out /
make room for the warm marrow /
that gives this pot its power
And the Leaves, the Flowers
She was the only person who left me a note about what type of tree she is—which by the way is a magnolia. (Ask her why.)
Self-Portrait as Yurico Eating a Strawberry
Red-faced and enraged, I bite into /
red strawberries, my face blooming /
red. I read red words in a book my father /
read. All of the pages are red. All of the words a- /
re distractingly read.
i just think it’s (kinda) funny how
the priest speaks of my parents
in many ways; though the undertaker
speaks in one.
After Leaving My Father at the Hospital on Christmas Day,
everywhere I look, I see eruption. A startle /
of ice cracks off a branch above my head. /
A local dog goes from saunter to sprint /
at the sight of a squirrel.
Subject to Dust
After our discussion of childhood traumas, once /
we’ve revisited a town in this valley named / Yettem (Armenian for Eden), you press your back against my chest.
I’ll Love You Until the End of the World
The telephone is ringing and the dead on Everest answer:
“I am so cold—please
don’t cry. Everything will be fine.”
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.
Redefining and Finding Structure for the Coffee Wife
the wife folds her arthritic body onto a shelf, a raccoon /
squeezing her backfat thin as water only flexible bones /
and silt filling her jello mold of pleated skin
“Cryptophasia” & “The Engineer”
I imagine a glitch: corroded wires,
infinite loops of fritz-stuttered signals
declaring that every day is August 5th,
so every day the machine sings, celebrates itself
alone
I Broke Up With An Alien
Backs of knees are pornographic. But openly
hairier. My alien agrees with me. Or, at least,
its sequins flash an affirmative when prompted.
Aurora Borealis
In life, we are playing with dangerous games: you, the witness
of the visiting vatnajökull now blushing pink in the atom sky
with the bright comedy of Frigg fooling the ashes of the colour,
and I, making a cryogenic favour to the moonless nights
Architeuthis
In December of 2015, a giant squid swam into Toyama Bay in Japan. A local dive shop owner guided the squid back out to the ocean. The squid clung to the diver’s body using its legs' suckers. Later, the diver said the squid was “unexpectedly beautiful, its body glowing red.”
Still the Thorns, I’m Not Running
After midnight I see it coming: a finale marked in gravel and salt. I /
come down for sinner’s stripes, wear these clothes like queens do, /
take the stairs slowly, out of the flood and into blue. This is what /
the sun is for; still in the night I collect stars and I collect bees and I / keep them in mason jars, like little yellow dreams, my magic.
Circe Invites the President to a Maine Lobster Boil
I wish I could paint
you red, and fuse
your four fingers together,
on each hand leaving
only the thumb free.
No Joke
It’s aflame with corpses. We live in the past. / Every dead star still burning in our eyes.
OKAY, FLORIDA
Before the hurricane, we had a rosebush.
An avocado tree. Limes. The backyard,
where we hid plastic Easter eggs, buried
the bones of small pets.
Lady Macbeth
auditory and visual hallucinations, she explains
casually, as if describing the weather
of California in July.
American History
The tapestry must be frailed
if it is to survive, flipped over
Ash, But Also Ash
On those childhood Sunday mornings
we used to watch the Orions take flight
from the naval air base.
Two Poems by Caitlin Wolper
they pull out the woman / through her gut:
think of the space now, / open studio with white walls, / dust like milkweed drifting
Two Poems by Hannah VanderHart
A diving bird, the pink duck returns for its things. What things? Whatever we took that made it dip its pink head under the waters, not to reappear. Its iridescent beetles, split-wings lifting in the air; its patch of jade grass; its water lilies; its tufted body, without the bullet’s path and tear.
Catch and Release
Catch and Release by Douglas Cole He waves and smiles and saysyou guys look like celebritiesthe black jacket…
Three Poems by Shirley Jones-Luke
A Portrait of Michael Brown that Wasn’t Michael Brown after Ferguson & The White Card Black outline on…
Three Poems by Emily Paige Wilson
Poet as Doctor (ii) Let’s begin again: this medicine, this muse, this moon that won’t blue. Murmur quartz…
I Am David Attenborough and These Are My Nature Poems
There’s a Boat for Nelly Do you want to take a ride with me? See deep denizens flitting…
In St. Mawes
In St. Mawes Once, in Tampa, we made a drunken habit of jumping off bridges into the bay,…
Two Poems by Kanika Lawton
Year of the Pig There is no word for “gentle” on this tongue; cut sharply against the fat…
Kindertransport
Kindertransport for david attenborough Everything we loved in a suitcase the size of a loaf of bread. Everything…
Instructions for Waking & Four More Poems
Instructions for Waking Don’t imagine your bones sound like the rusty jaws of the garbage truck, that groans…
Melanoma: The Politics of My Skin
MELANOMA: THE POLITICS OF MY SKIN One moment of quiet and I’ll be able to think about stitches…
Micro / Cosmos & Two More Poems
Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. / There are already enough names. –– Lao Tsu
capreolsapien gives thanks too late
capreolsapien gives thanks too late first flurry with these antlers watch me shed them watch them glitter all…
Lancing the Toe & Unbreakable
In the middle of surviving you, I sat on the sidewalk outside the bookshop that paid me too little, sterilized a safety pin with the flame of a lighter and stabbed it through my right
big toe.
Revision & Two More Poems
I can count the number
of times we touched
on two hands plus
two feet, plus your
hands and your feet.
The Bees & Two More Poems
The Bees The bushes are alive with bees, Like clockwork they fly from clover patch to shrub. Their…
Then and There
Then and There A rook snags a branch in the sycamore outside my bedroom window. That’s not what…
art vs. blowjobs & on kindness
our wanderings conjure desire, the selfish kind—hunger
to ask for more without bothering to hear the answer.
The Kids That Look Like Me Keep Dying
The Kids That Look Like Me Keep Dying Leaning bicycles on old iron fences. The kids grow out…
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.
“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
“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.