Poetry

After the Impact Someone comes pouring through me like gunpowder, overestimating the limits of my skin and serially unbraiding my bones. Later on, cold facts shear away from me like comets so fast they leave craters where seas might start so armies of arrivers can march in the night, slashing...

The Burden He's: the amoeba glue that binds together a chair of toothpicks straddled by this flat’s inhabitants, except this resin is not solid, is not set by design must give a little to bear the weight of us We: are the meters a skyscraper must be able to lean...

Let there be multiplication What orientation / the middle of the road point your compass / toward true failure hovering god / your rating was very good not excellent / not four stars vouched for after six days this / a home away from home unpracticed perfection / not recommended...

Summer with its clairvoyance— the woundlight marks its borderland. A larcenous, an other -worldly dark enjoins us to stay another minute. Carboniferously sift us, damage. Help us glimmer over this obsidian: all slag & de- realized. Null caress & smoke. Rag-picking shadows, do not spare us. We famish into nothing’s...

Raw Honey on the hills of the antelope valley poppy reserve in california, the blooms of the state flower billow like small red dresses. like orange streaks of citrus. the poppies are thin-hipped, silky and hammered with fire. my sister tears them from the ground like weeds. she hides her...

Revisitations This is summer closing: sweet aloe drink and linger. Plexiglass floors suspended over the wreckage of some ancient neighborhood in what is now Mapo. An archaeological treasure, to be so preserved despite fire. Say one spark off a coal briquette kisses what it should not, an arm of dried...

Before language, there were hands. To receive, deliver. This I know—the holding of things, the releasing. How with fingertips he fed the ashes of my letters to the star magnolia’s shadow. How, into the ivied blue of his palms, I placed my gifts: 17 ammonites, the skull of a deer,...

after I set the grass on fire as a child. A rude interruption to a spaghetti casserole as the neighbor stopped by to tell us our yard was burning. My student fights fires in the summer. Turns in his papers early to leave to fight the new burns. When you...

Evening Song Love set you up with a tight hot fist Boy-love soured quickly as they always do but doesn’t the thought of pineapple cull the same spit as the real thing You’ve got a mouthful of want you’ve got to drip Listen you’re by a window and you’re looking...

i was part of the harvest i like to tell myself that this was because i was part of the bloom i was part of the harvest why was i ever considered part of a crop i was part of the harvest let’s re-visit the field party i was part...