Poetry

We don’t serve Arabs says the man behind the counter. He fixes his eyes on me & awaits my consent. My Arab taxi driver blinks, unfazed. Racism has long abided in his home. Politeness takes over. We head for the car. The ride is smooth & silent. Barren valleys cascade...

The Holocaust followed my father like a sibling he didn't like but couldn't disown, always there, always whispering in his ear. He repaired what cars he could, performed his small rituals, wore his hats, until one day he woke up and realized he couldn't fix himself or the world. His...

A yellow bird fell out of my mouth squealing and wet, chewed up and you held it in your hands like an apple seed. “How’d that get in there” you ask, back to the white cinderblock of my dorm stroking its damp feathers. Cooped up and stuffed for a long...

[untitled] Little I through the hills, the daisies moving beside me. I watch the cows low the fields, shuffle their horns, tongue one another clean. A sun-gap bleaches the details, each face ink-bled—full blank—whole caves spilling light. I reach the barn, my dress flutters the wind; grandmother said Once, they...

Uncouth for the calling venture to say I can guess how many sluices have been integrated into your brains is not a way of looking or preaching or holding. I stand to be anything but wind I stand with a knee in the water my shin bent in a lowly...

I ask again to be served the difference between cha and chai over a meal I cannot refuse and mother invites me to taste how well cha mixes with samosas and how funny chai rolls off the tongue as if regional disputes on the other side of the inflatable globe...

A delusion is only a picture in The Audubon Guide . Color photos of my face before the anti-psychotics worked all food into fat, I had shed all the fur I could. Learning to swim after the flood came, but the gulch was swallowed by the iron blood of sand,...

the continuous efforting of it all or felt panic as one dropped into hard waters an apple falling from the tallest tree not that I’m suggesting you crane your neck no right in front of you the human gait is in fact a continually arresting falling movement merely the body...

trash on the train tracks / Steph finds a remote controlled / vibrator a cheap one / vibrating egg on a wire / she tries to touch us with it we scream Ryan trips / into the ditch / comes up / with a stray hypodermic needle speared / thru...

Believing he did & you will I asked the ground how it felt not being clean enough to hold the pierced balloons of breathless beauty snagged on the teeth of time. The sadness was pathologically red seeping up from the latest wound earth had just sustained. Standing there weeping like...