Mulan (1998)

poetry
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ always in my parents’ dream, no- +++++++++++ body is born daughter no powdery +++++ cheeks no white night, sighs and- ante no round- the-clock wishing I +++++++++++++ were married:…

Where are you from?*

poetry
  A womb sounds like a wound  in my mouth. A daughter portends losses. My mother  carried, in her womb, a wound without eyes. She grew up  with no mother,…

Bravado

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…

Self-Portrait as Green Onion

poetry
  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…

sky burial

poetry
  +++“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. &…

The Wind Makes an Offer of Salvation

poetry
  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…

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

poetry
  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…

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

poetry
  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…

Differentiation

poetry
  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…

The Prayer of Puer Aeternus

poetry
  +++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…

ESL Lessons

poetry
  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.…