My grandma lives in a double-wide trailer on an acre of land her husband left her. My family lives a few hours south, but I don’t get along so well with my dad, so I’m spending time up here. She bought the doublewide from a family whose father died of throat cancer. They had to […]

All the girls in our town are assigned a corpse to carry once they’re old enough. It stays with you nearly forever, slung around your neck, or held in your arms, or somehow fastened to your body if you’re clever enough, or lucky enough to get help to do so. Boys don’t get corpses. They […]

Family I was too young to know these things. They were my big, beautiful and exciting teenage stepsisters. I had inherited them overnight when our mothers fell in love and moved us all in together to that apartment on 15th street with the tall ceilings and steep winding stairs that led to a sunny patch […]

I am staring down at my grandmother’s sunken face.   She wears her FitBit on her wrist, the same amethyst-filled rings she always wore, and her hair is spiked like usual. Only today, the tips of her hair are purple. “Do you like it?” my mother asks between sniffles. I nod my head. “She always […]

for a traveling circus acrobat   You swing here from the East where nothing is dusty — just diesel and domes. Where church spires are syringes flushed from earth like strung-out doves, pinpricked vessels of stupor. Here, cows cluster in gangs. They chaw and low. I wish you’d unhook my blouse, sewn from spit and […]

“I will die completely cured.” -Salvador Dali On our last night we stared for five minutes at van Gogh’s Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette & I asked if he meant it as an anti-smoking lesson. Libby laughed, her hair like Clouds -era Joni Mitchell buoyant as her shoulders shook. We spent that summer […]

headline from a small-town newspaper   I imagine your breath smells — though I’ve never seen you close enough to sniff you, or even wave to you from a window of a car, piloted by me or another daylight driver. Though once, long ago, at summer camp, I saw a horse wipe its dripping snot […]

I was eighteen when my grandfather gave me the vintage 1974 Leica M4 he bought the year I was born. I hardly took shots with it; I was still afraid of everything then, of breaking that precious hardware my grandfather spent so much money on. Afraid of losing it to the St. Bernard-faced thief skulking […]

I went from market to market for years, because Mexico is in its markets – Pablo Neruda inhale   fried pig skin peppers tortillas dirt car tires                                               cigarette smoke dry wood violin strings […]

I like football, ketchup on my scrambled eggs. My biggest sin, perhaps, is I speak English to my parents.   I’m a bad Mexican. Yet, I like carne asada over BBQ, Latina women who speak Spanish in my ear.   I root for México in soccer. I’m a bad American, too. I like Sunday morning […]

and she laughs. oh, baby—baby, this damn world’s been ending for damn ever. she plunks her translucent body down on your blank side of the bed. you, that other ghost, who did not come to comfort me. the mattress is memory foam and so does not register her weight, but if it wasn’t, it would: […]

  For V   The clouds are flaking embers again, evergreens spraining their necks. Words reach my tongue and hatch into a swarm of robber flies. They wilt and crumble in the Holocene sun as it sets within me. Parking lot mountain range of snow, an orangely-lavender contrail that floats like an opposite spirit above […]

My husband Amir tells me, “better to have a tall man,” as he gets riz from the cupboard’s top shelf. His Kalashnikov’s under the sink. Bombs rattle the pots and pans. He rips open the ten-kilo sack. Who will cook for him tomorrow? Me, in his arms. dirt and motor oil stain his shirt. “How’d […]

but not in a sexy way / not in the way we used to / by which I mean the way / we might have / I remember us / only in the moments we touched / the concert at The Warhol / you stood close to me / as if it were crowded / […]

Lights up: One-Armed-Kenny sits in his window-less panel van, drumming the fingers of his one good hand on the steering wheel. An unlit cigarette hangs from his lips. Leonard approaches. Kenny steps out of the panel van, the cigarette still hanging from his lips.   KENNY You’d be Leonard? LEONARD Kenny? KENNY That’s right. LEONARD […]

CHARACTERS JULIAN, mid-twenties, male-identifying, Bryce’s live-in boyfriend BRYCE, mid-twenties, female-identifying, Julian’s live-in girlfriend NURSE, any age, ethnicity, or gender; working the late-shift (Lights up. A hospital emergency room, in some city. A few seats, paired together. A small table with some magazines. It’s late, maybe midnight: We hear sounds of ambulances, doctors being paged, beeping […]

1. At the end of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Transcendental Etude” a woman walks away from the argument and jargon in a room to sit alone in a kitchen turning in her lap/bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps. It is a kind of creating that isn’t about virtuosity, but care for the many-lived, unending/forms in […]