Once more you’ll find me staring at my reflection and wiggling each tooth just to make sure they’re not loose like at 4 a.m. in REM mode and ripping layers and layers with blood gushing curlicues down the drain so that’s why it’s backing up only a few months after we snaked it out, the mouthwash gunk and gobs of… Read more →
use a lot of muscle, lifting that fence it’s rotting at the post: I can’t stop being seen, I’m glass gray streaks on the blue sky a bird crossing it charged with what’s in me the plane in the back of the sky blinks like a drone I come at the air it takes me till the trunk is danger… Read more →
My support group jerked and juttedinto a crowd mob full of phantomsdancing about us, unbothered bydeath but eager to bicker aboutwhich of us addicts masquerade as alive best.Eventually, one ghost hammers the asphaltwith his feet, fashioning an inclineto tilt us into finite. Sensing danger,one of us declares his love for all gods.Most of the others split themselves intochips of flint,… Read more →
We spilled some of her ashes on our way through the woods. The weight of the urn tore a hole in the backpack, and the urn hit the ground hard, knocking the lid loose. She had been gone a while, but it came to us that our favorite spot, a quiet bank by the river, was a good resting place…. Read more →
Ceiba, its roots slate gray, thin and tall like walls,provided protection contra el sol sofocante.Provided materials for the Taínos to build canoes with. Its bark was solid but kept over rough waves.The canoe fishing, tradition. No one bats an eyeif you can’t catch a fish. Pero eres una anomalía if you can’t cook a family dish passed down generationsthat somehow… Read more →
Yaso Saijo wrote a poem, “Tomino’s Hell,” after losing his family during World War I, Maene whispers. Maene thinks the poem is a curse. You’re afraid of Maene, she is the eldest in your middle school dormitory, and you know the poem exists to kill whomever reads it aloud, and yet you listen. The ceiling fan whirls, the wind beyond… Read more →
they say we ran into the ocean with all our clothes they say i was jealous of you say we live on an island we are a city on an island our clothes salted crisp and we enter i say i swam your hair i say your hair was a river say your hair was a river and i swam… Read more →
I was thirty when my father, Jerry, died in McKinleyville, California. The last time I saw him, I held his shrunken body upright from behind while he urinated, my arms wrapped around his chest. It was like hugging a bag of wheezing, cancer-ridden feathers. It was the first time Jerry didn’t smell like cigarettes. He pissed in… Read more →
As night passes through the crossroads, houses beside the highway leave trails of gingerbread work around their eaves, and I wonder if I should stop and look, consider how a fancy turned and curled signified beauty, fashion, or grace, and here was more than here or there, a place where the sun gave up its spirit. On the edge of… Read more →
The net that keeps the herons & hawks from a plunge attack froze in the late fall cold spell, early for New Jersey, unexpected worrying auger for the winter to come, & the weight of ice—two inches in spots— pulling it down to where your fish already huddle. First, I broke the surface repeatedly with a hammer not knowing until… Read more →