Category: Poetry

I don’t remember― but I wrote as if I did. I told you about my bed and my clothes and the silence, and all about the color blue, and how I don’t have it in my bedroom or my bathroom or in any of my kitchen towels. I said it wasn’t my favorite color and…

In monarchs’ overwintering groves, there were once so many butterflies that the sound of their wings was described as a rippling stream or a summer rain. Center for Biological Diversity   Small child, dark husband, roving hand, the man who discovered places in me that no man should discover so early; first whispers of marriage…

Hill 937. Let me offer you from Sa Huỳnh copper bowls and lingling-o, that double-headed amulet of milky nephrite green. Our ceremony calls for this. Now hold my spirit steady. At its base, regard my grandmother—some one- thousand, seven-hundred-sixty-eight years later, south of Đà Nẵng—coded daily with its embers. Enemy of State or Enemy of…

I. I was channeled, spoken by that sunburst. II. Vaulting through wide crevices of noun, our rooms were filled with music. III.  Only then described by reoccurrence, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote—There Is No Question—but our spectacle of green. And you were channeled, too. IV. To vocalize as such, to multiply, that build-up shone among our bodies.…

(1) it is a tongue holding itself like an ear. its rims can’t keep their shape. they lisp into the mattress, leave the sheet apostrophed against the wall, head slapped, gagged in froth, dreams tipped, bound in bruise-fade.   in the morning it is an eye. it draws white-flash fences on its locked doors. where…

unlike borders, etched in the earth                                             with a knife, headlines are often written delicate; a fuse, a blast, a city that was                                       and they soften the blow in a language today’s dead never spoke.                                                              i am reminded words always translate when buried in the earth…

like monarchs bitter from all the milkweed hope, in its before-form, is only a measure of protection i swallow, drink from wind. how i squash that same old, same old tamp it down with the tin. maybe it’s best to not turn from the truth but truth is really just what sticks best like beggar’s…

There was a moment, in fifth grade. I, sitting on the floor next to those metal and plywood desks, waiting for the bell to ring me home to my mother, home to the street which was flooded so high I could go out in my bathing suit and lay in it, could forget about my…

Our son twists his face into the panicked look you might get right before a car crash as he stomps his foot and says Your mom’s 
gonna get raped and you’re gonna cry and we wonder where he heard that. His behaviorist told us to whisk him off to his room to mellow his meltdowns,…