POETRY

“Once an not now I/parachuted from a daring little plane.//As if a shipwreck survivor I crawled onto shore.”

CITRUS IS MY ONLY HOME To bite into an orange is not the same as to cut into an orange is not the same as to pick the orange

“I want a life where I feel strange and intimate/with the border between the real and unreal//and still get to eat.”

“if Rome had fallen here, this desert/would have made it look like the most miraculous/& inviting smoke.” “if Rome had fallen here, this desert/would have made it look like the most miraculous/& inviting smoke.”

“Often, when my mother leafs through large, cluster stacks of paper and/prepares them for the shredder, I imagine skin.”

“I say hello/to a small face peeking/round the corner of someone’s house:/a cat in my mind/until it stands upright…”

“He grabs and grabs your hand and you keep going, daring and bargaining and begging for grace, trapped in all the muck and fluidity of the in between space.”

“My vagina is mostly scales; it belongs/in the water, filtered and innocent.”

“my dolls have hands not much smaller than mine/I rip the arms off my plastic baby doll/my mother pops them back in the sockets”

“And yes,/I still see spirits by the fireplace. A whole orgy/of voluptuous ghosts eating honey roasted peanuts.”

“wheel chair/accessible/*back entrances”

“You have/a sans-serif face; I wanna check out/your cerebrospinal fluid.”

“People bloom and divide like kaleidoscope beads around her blond yellow bead head.”

“in the cobbler I baked a part of me/was not sure you would have a piece/because I could have been//alone.”

“I’ve seen a boy go missing inside himself, so I searched for him/in cracked church bells & shot-out light bulbs.”

“She knows/how to mouth no, the shape/of her lips an opening pit…”

“& I’m tuned into/the cicadas,/wanting to join/but what part/of the body/makes a sound/so primordial”

“Who wants a body that/wants this much to be alive?”

“No. I drank the oldest lake because it was either drink that or the drink the oldest sea and I’d already drank the oldest sea a few months ago…"

I know these rivers that flow through me / I’ve gazed out from their hearts and still you do not see me

They were no less fragile than us, these creatures, / but they seemed better used to staring down a fast / coming death.

It’s Sugar features a giant / blond plump lips parted, sucking a lollipop

I said to my partner yesterday, I want to die. / He said do you want to go to the hospital.

Then I wait, a woman / alone, hoping / to have touched the heart / of the widower.

maybe it is time for me to write poems for You. The Somebody Else. / i need to find a way to eat what comes out of me. The Wonder

CREW: (From the grid) It’s sweet that you think you / can break the fourth wall.  

The horse stood trembling, had caught his leg in a toothed snare intended for the fox, / and she limped

you can take the boy / but the heckie naw stays / announcing his nation

white woman says that i would look so beautiful if only i took the time to straighten my hair

My priestess fries her perfect / eggs-in-a-nest: a seeping well, / saturating seams of crust.

At the duplicating center I work for, sometimes customers will leave behind important legal or personal documents

it was like in that moment, / the demon crawled out / of my chest to set a colorless fire / to my face and said believe her

Not all clouds is something I might add, as a postscript, not all clouds

ma said don’t touch don’t scratch don’t

you can return to masonry / be a gavel

At sixteen, she’s still new to this nation that un-names her daily.

trying to contain expansion means explosion

Our son will have solar flare / freckles splattered on his cheeks

I cannot take what isn’t a gift. Socket, Stiff dance, misdeed, a half intelligible embrace.

My mother always laughs / when she tells that story.

I call you Ella from your very beginning

yellow almonds, middle eastern eyes

the women did not flee Mosul because they became of wings

I told father and things came flowing out of our red front door

Ghosts are like our otherselves in the multiverses grown

In the ghost town, a way station until E.’s wedding, you keep your vow to a dry-tongued silence.

My spoiled teeth suck down brawny intrusions.

I wish I did not negotiate my body like a capitalist always fearing my scarcity

hammered into the wall of the coffin pit picked up by me as you wandered as far along the rails as needed.

Between my fingers is a veil through which I may glimpse the sun.

Nobody is surprised. Nobody even tries to leave.

His mother kept two cockatoos in her bedroom. They sometimes shat on her bed, nightstand, on framed pictures of Angelito’s grandfather.

When the rhino broke its way out of your body / it broke its horn off too

I am failing to speak the language but I know now it is possible

& I’m not hearing All You Wanted by Michelle Branch or what about my skin or religion needs to be rescued

"folks care more about cars than they do bodies"

I am sure that my blonde hair is beautiful but the beauty of my other physical attributes I am much less sure of 

Ugolino is a no-eyed man who jumps on his children

At the fading light bring to her the wolfish mouth of your need.

closed eyes to the watchers in the shadows angels formed in angles beneath the glittering opal

i awoke to the sound of a neighbor crying someone’s suffering is combing my hair

Sometimes when I enter a room, I pretend Zamunda from Coming to America is a real place.

If I could be seen as a force instead of an object instead of a hobby, if I could just do without having to be seen, or if it didn’t matter to me at all, I could be invincible.

black out the windows but the storm is in the house lightning in the bathtub rain over the carpet

Is it because always running is a cliché? And clichés are a rerun of something different? And since you were a boy, did they feed you questionable

i went to see the wizard & asked him for a cock he must have seen by the scuffs on my knees that i really needed one because he said ok

my small fingers curl around a cow’s teat. i point / it in the direction of the pail below. i don’t want to hurt

an animal on stilts reaches the virgin’s tears / and tenderly wipes them. / the virgin cries tres monjitas milk, without coffee.

Someplace else enrages the turtle why a turtle a turtle never did anything to me okay then an old white man with a sign.

Geoffrey, sometimes I think I wear my sadness like caul fat. / Like how a fetal pig never asks to be dressed

Despite everything, my parents raised me. / They even loved me. These things / should always be surprising.

When E is gone / and left / who will I be?

I watched a woman become gore under microscopes, / glowing skin a subterfuge of dust and memory.

all of the lights in the store have gone burnt / dim gaping shelves bent back like bones / breathing fruit rot and dust and no one

What is the problem what is it I ask myself day after day it does not change / I walk through the rooms of my house I open the windows though it is cold

The priest feels a softness washing the back of his neck. Maybe it is rain, he thinks, or sweat.

that curved through the lungs and pierced everything I feared losing –

Anxious Diva tells me I’ve lost what’s fun about me. She says I’m flatter than death. Diva, help me cut these onions, help me feel arrhythmia, tell me how alive I want to be.

We cling to each other like / dust motes to light, and / fall the same way - slow and / landing in erratic patterns.

i couldn't remember what flowers The Hatchet liked so i brought some twigs and branches from the backyard

the overweight cannibals feed every fortnight the children frolic on our scalps this knocking is not a verb

I cannot take what isn’t a gift. Socket, Stiff dance, misdeed, a half intelligible embrace.

pre-existing conditions and the deep deep cuts that still draw blood and still take cultures

history & all its seasonings. Introduce her to your parents, your gods, your sharpened knives. Fry.

while everyone else takes out the ladder for fun. The last time I was fun

sweeping the floors after dusk isn’t easy, the frangipani petals still fragrant, still usable, when

frogs of lead who bust up your skinny lip by agreement, the paradisiac fields excised, the empty spaces removed from our carapace. a better future for the region. international

I receive reams of dry & toneless correspondence that all boil down to never mind

knows this road where it leads us home cocooned we watch our wings we grow we sleep rise and shine