The first fragment I recover, my father is bathing my brother & I. We are in our flat in Vernon Park. I am a child, six at most, submerged in a plastic bucket. No one speaks. No voices escape their open jaws. My father & brother in their boxers. The walls the colour of old blood. Someone asks me if… Read more →
It’s so embarrassing to have anything known about you. Shoe size or where you are ticklish. Oral allergies. The long, lapsing brain fog of your hormonal miseries: cringe categorizations of your sorry existence. There’s an app to identify species, as if a toad is not just a toad; a roach, not just a roach. As if a sad bitch is… Read more →
Each day the fire in the corner of my cubicle grows larger, I’d tell my girlfriend. Though not a described responsibility, a part of my job was to do my work, head down, and watch it burn. My Disc- man warm to the touch and the spinning chrome tinted a flame-gold. I’d either scan invoices or receipts the drivers turned… Read more →
He cuddles in the armpit of the sliding door. Until he soars back and forth, and slams against the glass, demanding elsewhere. The escapism in him seems teenager—so I call him young, although he could be thirty, or so. Pack animal, but he’s an outsider among my shelves of used paperbacks and prefabricated wood. Some Native American tribes say bats… Read more →
At night, I press the flat part of my hand against each door, locked and alarmed. Once, the code was my mother’s birthday. I’d thought I could step all the way out onto the concrete stoop into the sunshine, look up at the clear blue sky and hold the whole place in between my shoulders, compressed down to the size… Read more →
Freedom, you misplace my identity At the tollgate, yet you find a face Reflected in eyes that iron air. Perhaps a concept can burn into a person, But when will my body And my sisters become people? Loss hides in the hills behind us— I lose a language in the name of nationhood. The route home is as dilapidated as… Read more →
My nose. The year you learn to worship it. You, me, together in the year of same differences. It’s the year I become unbear- able. The year I finally get the cut that accentuates the year. Year of the crag, the watermelon slice, the conk, proboscis, beak, schnoz. Year of the nasal voice. Year of the nasal flare. Year of… Read more →
Hibiscus, you’re a hand while alive— You will die as a fist, fingers folded. I don’t believe in rebirth but your stem does. The replacement raises a thumb at dawn, Waves with a wink when the fist falls— Five petals find me sweeping skeletons. You nod my way yet kneel to greet eternity. The heat of that handshake could cook… Read more →
Spat out tiny Salamanders. Their Toes were torches, eyes Orange-hearted flames, Their noses snorted whole Galaxies of smoke. Only then did I say Why? How? Where? They crawled inside My ears, then I was An eye in an egg Floating in pond water, Breaking open, crawling Over land. Then, My face, in time, stayed Close to grasses, Gasping, until at… Read more →
To count the times a basketball changes hands demands such single-mindedness that half of us miss the gorilla who disrupts the psychiatrist’s skit, so if the question is whether anyone remarked the buck— patient as a lawn ornament— where pitch sloped to thicket, I doubt it. I do not doubt you could hide a troop of gorillas in a peewee… Read more →