Poetry

Fox Season

Sounds like a woman being murdered, the young woman who cuts my hair in a neat bob says about the mating foxes in her parents’ yard. Last summer, alone in bed, I heard a woman screaming in our backyard. What’s the famous story about the woman who was murdered and no one called the police. Do you mind, my mom… Read more →

Change of Season

I look out my window in our senior facility as winds turn the page forward— familiar change, we have seen it all before, some nearly a century of it; most of us will remember to set our clocks back tonight, and regain the hour of life we’ll lose again next spring. When we meet in the corridor we are acquainted… Read more →

Seasonal Fruit

Our first summer together: the avocado tree in my backyard bowed its head under the weight of fruit so plump it would burst under the delicate pressure of your painted fingernails. The whole neighborhood must have heard us laughing — those little green planets in our hands! — because soon enough, the local mayas were singing at our doorstep, little… Read more →

Every Rabbit

every rabbit in a ten-mile radius has gone to flight. they’re late. they’re late. only some are lucky enough to have pocketwatches. most just run because time doesn’t exist only within constraints of humanity. so here the rabbits run because otherwise means death. what is seen as a cute & peaceful life is just another day of danger. the rabbits… Read more →

For My Uncle

Naples was a heatstroke—everything humming: cicadas, burnt spoons, salt licking my earlobes. He handed me a bucket and told me to collect the broken ones. Shells split like lips. Jagged spirals. Rust-pink teeth. Veins that pulsed in the sun’s throat. The kind you’d never want in your pocket but couldn’t stop running your fingers over. He said the ocean spat… Read more →

Avicide

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 →

Seek

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 →