The telephone rings at three in the morning, the receiver shouts into my mother’s ear: Papá esta muerto!

he is my favorite MC so I place his photo next to my favorite poem about birds being men and men being birds

I ruin beauty. Crumpling underneath lights, / it doesn’t take much to crush them.

Another way to say haunting / is still alive. I wanted to study / the future but drove instead / through the city where I used to live.

Did you know that most corals are neither male nor female? You too, stone. Stone coral, so stony in your corallite, so skeletal in your hunger, so red / red / red.

My grandmother traded her sanity for the freedom of inescapable things. The helix my / mother builds for me shares her disappearances. It is the reason I fear the faces of my own future children

Arthur, in a strapping Christmas sweater / Arthur, in a patch of grassy elm, weaving through the trees / Arthur, his jeweled teeth, tearing through rawhide

for: weirdos, freaks, math whizzes, candy-sniffers, burrito-makers, lunch-queers, pep aliens & any other creature unnamed on the outside looking in

(seven days and her food turns / poison),/ and so i stage a rescue, / and we'll see how it goes.

Here the plátanos peel themselves, even the green ones. Especially the green ones. The husks of their outer layer sit by almost perfectly intact.

it is in my nature / to always be forgiving, to / swallow the fragment of bone / instead of spitting. so then / i let my body convalesce, / shimmer and steam light / into an undiscovered medium.

disappointment. later i will press / mouth to ear and confess / i am sakit, drawing your escape

the undoing of heart-brains / happens quick with avalanches / of words that split us open / through wet exhales of anxiety

into a sewergrate for all the sunless creatures / to stare @/awestruck until one steps forth & / declares this the second coming of their god / & all the creatures fall to praise

Like many women, I’m terrified of becoming my father. When I was born the hospital ran out of pink caps and gave me to him a boy.

imagine i am 24 married to rami or fadi or even moussa imagine i wear the big white dress imagine i am 28 with two children imagine i am searching but not finding

They say: SOFTEN. They say: GO OUTSIDE. They say: TRUST IN THE PROCESS.

I want a god big enough for me. A tree / strange enough to take root in molten body. You animals with you / sense of ritual. You animals with your peace and dirt and planting.

Or something florid enough to mean the transitions / Between silence and my father's tentative humour, / Feeling out the sleek ghosts of our unlit passage. / Nothing grim.

These college boys are holding court with a beer in each hand. These Cinderellas know they only have until 2am to fight, to kiss, to cry.

Flashing my yellow teeth every time someone tripped / I’m not expecting spring to bring joy, how can I / When I can’t bring myself to step out of bed & skin

exile first my, tongue mother my father’s my displaced too which amused often mother

M’ija, she said to me softly, I will show you that the thickness and pigment aren’t really much.

what if i could be / my own therapist / my own safe space / say it lisa / say what you’ve done / walked away from / given up on / held the face / of everyone you’ve ever kissed /

Destroying the poorly constructed narrative around them. Banishing blaxploitation backward in time from Foxy Brown and Super Fly to the first iteration of a happy slave in a textbook.

you, a paper plane— a fancy one—with a sharpie

The dog has wet the bed again, / an act of dominance, / not an accident.

I’ve carried a “Keep Calm, Carry On” bookmark in my pocket for the last 22 days.

bantu knots / twist out / wash n go / coils! turkey / ham / mac n cheese / greens!

—It didn't hurt much (like a shot from doctor) but feels a little weird physically now but that is probably definitely psychology

sometimes i crawl into sleep where i’m barefoot and clumsy, where the asphalt rumbles underneath, where the liquor-glass gets all stuck in a smile between my teeth

Have you ever called a trans person by their dead name Have you ever been trans Have you ever tried being trans Have you ever tried being cis

Saturday mornings were for Marshalls. For holding tightly to Dad’s hand, and watching the Black women drag children who looked like me – all fuzzy edges and plastic barrettes and knotted curls.

K & I ball surrounded by trees / & the faint huff of lightning bolts.

On the day of her only birthday, she dips / a finger in the cake before she slips / it into my mouth.

Faucet spewing fear that runs constantly in the Back of your mind in Adulthood. You aren’t blind With rage at first. First you are blind with fear.

Fear that I will muddle my manners. Fear that I will matter little. Fear that I will dither like a biddie, bobble like a budgie.

Lost Tooth / dear Cut Hair / dear Wonder / dear Rain / dear Still Puddle / dear Mirror / dear Empty Hands / dear Body—

they get / shipped / somewhere / they can’t / upset the / elderly

WHEN I SAY I WANT TO LEARN YOUR MOTHER’S RECIPE, I MEAN

he doesn’t eat fish anyway, so it’s okay but i still have to stare at the eyeballs

something that took so long to put to bed / & now a quieting / like the invention of streetlights

close the door that lets infection in to heal on its own / time immune system rehearsing its answer to / affliction

because I’ve always been better at taking weight / than giving my own

spilling their brown limbs all over / as if to say thank you as if / to say thank you white man / you are justice you are godly

Our own kind of hot-as-hell, beautiful, brown home.

You remember the kiss hip moan you got but did not get, the wet strands between your tips your thrusting fingers their tender lips

before the nightclub, you stand staring at yourself in the mirror drenched in dream-smoke, a fishbowl of lavender. you trace the length of your collarbone.

I’ve always been magic – sprinkling fairy dust and bewitching rings of Saturn to orbit my equator with the switch of my hips.

if you are hurting / if you are uncertain / know that this body can hold itself to itself and undo at the same time / it is your nohkom saying kisâkihitin with her hands / stitching beads to a leather purse you will one day hold /

new york is the fifth city i miss you in your baby toenail fell off this year as it does

I hate to love this city. Where the stop sign on Berry has “6” painted under “Stop” so you know what hood it is.

*Source text for this erasure: Jose, Randall T., Ed. Understanding Low Vision. American Foundation for the Blind, 1983, p. 52-3.

If God came to me, my face would / burn, if God touched me, he would / crucify holes out of handshakes.

Come lie down beside me and touch my warm belly my little darlin’ / Scratch me like you mean it you cowardly dog / Just kidding I am the dog in this scenario

I will flip a pillow, say TODAY IS GOOD then roll / over in my bed like an overcooked beet.

When this Pokémon sings, it never pauses to breathe. If it is in a battle against an opponent that does not easily fall asleep, Jigglypuff cannot breathe, endangering its life.

No one notices when I'm late to work. / I just forgot to eat.

Here I am in loss, as losing; active loss. It’s a singing bird, small yellow-green, who thru special powers of love breathes without taking breath.

I’m starting a new religion. We only worship things that are green.

from the she’s all that moment we didn’t have bc we were too busy jacking off to jake gyllenhaal getting bashed

and it didn’t make me any less sad ok maybe a little bit less sad but still sad i still think about texting you the majority of the day i think the majority of me wants you to not be ok so that i can prove that this meant something i am scared that it didn’t mean anything

Our mother insists Jesus’ mother spanked him / when he misbehaved, and sinless he sobbed

in this poem Jesus laughs because he is very ticklish / in this poem he tells Gabriel / Quit it

God, so we will have to do / with what we get. Behind us

Why are there no stories? / Because there were none.

I want to be the one who gets daughters / into colleges with full rides, / brings the Go-Fund-Me page to completion

Perhaps when I drive off I will see a sky / with fullmoon-eyes, & I’ll know there is a God / & he been looking me up & down from all angles

I have always wanted to be a sculptor, holding possibility

sometimes I’m a disaster without knowing sometimes I’m looking at you my happiness completely in your hands love is pressure but it is also a few good consecutive calm moments

Doc the Ativan just give me the fucking Ativan or don’t

It’s the way you sit across from me / at the kitchen table / your hands enclosing a teacup

The call keeps dropping for the Arctic photographer on NPR, his voice fine and crisp and then suddenly drowned in a closet, choked by the devil

if the ape x stone cap is missing from the pyramid base it was strapped to a ship and shipped to the new world

The relationship was a sign that read Accident Free for __ days, that reset every morning to zero.

You pig-heart and I skin tapering off a drum face. You conjugate, animal-throated magician’s girl

And your greatest failure? / That they haven’t built a language from my name yet.

and I just scatter to his center like a little hair patch on his chest

but, when i was 19 i became more of a spill sometimes, i miss a mouth entirely.

His back in its sweater beads into sweat / but he likes the sweater — it reminds him / of his grandmother

A need for infrastructural upheaval is known in the way rays heat a body’s insides. Organs too cold to be housed within this temple. Pen says summertime sadness.

I find the boys break their legs chokehold them down / in the night keep them up I’m screaming YES YES YES.

into the B plot as into a hot tub, slip into my alternate time stream admit your acolytes

For example, my brother can’t write our last name in kanji but our obachan made me practice it for 20 minutes straight until it was beautiful enough to be written by an actual 日本人。.

the last time i loved, the words died in my belly. the sparks quit next, & then the boy.

The light says, I love these leaves. / The light says, you’ve been swindled. / The light says, let me dry off these rocks.

on trans street / there are bungalows / courtyard buildings / & rent control

next door and the tienda on the corner, who spoke / very little English, who didn’t mention his wife

I-coordinate-blue-and-pink-outfits-with, why don’t we / just nix the whole wedding idea, disappoint our parents, / and just go somewhere and eat wedding cakes?

I am in the mood to mourn / against the storm outside / I tear up under covers / turn on a warm light / Darling / I want your fingers