THREE YEARS LATER: Vertigo
(A poem is born outside, hanging by my window; it flirts with disaster.) I remember the first time we went to Central Library in DTLA. We walked around, perused the poetry and children’s section. This was where we belonged: we were delicate and foolish like the brittle petals of an autumnal wildflower, like an adobe-vintage-vase filled with salted caramel ice-cream… Read more →
Reading Diane Seuss While Coral Reefs Bleach
Manatee Bay heated like a kettle, while I watered wilting zinnias, yearned to turn back the tick-tock climate clock, only hope won’t deliver the cool I long for firefly nights thrum, oh— what a moon, silvering bluegrass. I shinnied up the Ash tree and afterward, had endless, steamy-mirror-crying showers. I smell the campfire sluicing off tangles, am still tasting grape… Read more →
Comfort Animals
Not once do I fear anything other than the possibilities of my own body breaking. In our moonless bed, I make you my teenage fantasy, crying on your hard chest as you mumble I’m here, I’m here, though you were just downstairs in my childhood bedroom, smashing a bookcase through the wall. Unlike a little girl’s board books with sweet… Read more →
native daughter
it’s the new year 21st century & old history is breathing fresh but look: Bessie came back. And she is lit, lemme tell you. She ain’t Bigger’s Bessie, never was. She got her own claims to Big. That busted brick over her head, that body-freeze in all-consuming snow after he threw her body down his shaft? That shove ain’t gonna… Read more →
Entrainment Dream
At the abandoned Air Force base, we walk through crumbling military houses. Vines crawl through the windows of nineteen-fifty style bathrooms. I feel as though a vacuum has been applied to my chest, like the air has been sucked from my body into the void. You wander over glass shards and moldering linoleum floors, your posture in a perpetual shrug…. Read more →
The Receipt Says
the females cost less than the males smaller slimmer shimmers of other veiltails above blue mustard throats swelling dorsal fins fluorescents distorted by wet walls no one with eyes & an anal fin deserves flat plastic for a sky even if it is cloudless if it dies in less than 14 days freeze the body & bring it back for… Read more →
Heartbeak [Sic]
As though some monstrosity were pecking its way out of our most penetrable parts and needed this pointed apparatus to crack through the shell walls that delimit our hard hearts, the heartbeak exists mostly where a missing r has plummeted out of heartbreak, leaving something sharper and clearer— this lance-like structure, this projection perfect for breaking, and thereby making a… Read more →