poetry

  +++ —to Mosab Abu Toha On this hillside, apple trees are calculating the precise moment to heave into blossom they almost vibrate with responsibility and I do not know what they pour into their algorithms Do they precisely tick … Read More

  Let’s talk about the quick memory of a green onion: How—snipped down to the white and, with water and omelet dreams, leaned in a Steelers double shot glass or a long emptied jar of capers or a keepsake cup … Read More

  +++“I looked at photographs and suddenly understood that a photograph +++was a letter to someone in the future.” —Rick Barot during the pandemic, my mother was still dead. & when i held out two fists, my children discovered a … Read More

  No one flies kites as once they did so now I carry shopping bags across your empty lots, topple careful mounds of leaves, find the gaps in window frames to dance the flames your scented candles cradle. You have … Read More

  Only certain things seem to stick. Gum beneath desks. Bird shit on windows. In a Princeton study, even physics slid away. The students were given the same test two months later, then six months later, then years and years, … Read More

  The standards call for a lesson on the afterlife of each religion. The students want to know what I believe in. The priests dried the king’s body with a gold scarab neatly tucked above the heart. This protected the … Read More

  I cry in this poem. There’s a difference between weep, sob, and cry: weeping is silent, I weep on trains alone. I cry in this poem. Sobbing is so loud. Sob only in private. When I write the poem … Read More

  +++Following the wrong god home we may miss our star. —William E. Stafford Oh god are you there yet they wish too hard for my metamorphosis for my tongue to bend toward wisdom and sweetness for my hands to … Read More

  i. a mother can devour the evolution of her daughter’s tongue After ESL class, a mother and her daughter wander into the corner where flowers crack through the concrete. The daughter plucks one of the flowers and offers it … Read More

  Again I watch a cousin           fitted for a wedding gown ++++++lace and strings tightened       across the back, whale elegy written across the spine          Fingers clasped around a bouquet ++++++Again the questions everyone             poses to me … Read More

  I bury my bloody underwear in the trash out back where coyotes yip at night. When we talk about the girl who drowned in the reservoir on the edge of town, I pick my skin open like a dare: … Read More

  To begin a new relationship with an old lover, is precisely that; new. How you cannot drink from the same river. Changing ways. Therapy and the co-pay. And so on, and so it goes. But when with an old … Read More