Intersection
Fish have something in them called a lateral line—this is what helps their schools stay together. When they want to stay still, they face upward. Into the current. Truth…
Furthermore, There’s No Real Telling What Propelled Us Here
Uber, tornado, romantic aspiration, deep psychological insight, deep horniness, whatever it was; and whatever it was we said to the other seventh-grade boys to get them to pull…
Temptation, Expulsion
A streetlamp scorching the cloth of night, a barbed acanthus on a wrought-iron fence, he was a platter of lemons and salted wounds. He could not tend. He seeded…
Starting Treatment during Covid
In the hinge between a summer of open-air dining and falling case numbers and the oncoming winter of closed doors and stuffy classrooms, we begin to compromise…
can’t quite hold
trust, surrender, broth on the stove, yesterday’s bones when she was young, eva named the chickens now she only names her dresses—night-elk, goldenrod stable-stained, wild plum, a well-made dress…
Wanting to Sign Furiously But Can’t
When I want to beat up the world with my fists, my forearms boil over with an easy rage. Sometimes I forget to breathe and nearly die. In my…
Dream in Which I Give You My Memories as Dreams
for Frannie, at four months Even in sleep you hunger: purse your lips and bellow your cheeks as though to nurse from the world. Material things, you’ll outgrow,…
Minority Report
White Guy #1 to receive White Guy #2 Named Fellowship for Distinguished Position as Dead White Guy #3 Chair of University Department X. White Guy #1 named recipient…
Maleficent
i. in seventh grade I learned to pray in Spanish is rezar edged like razor, work & worship, I learned adoption was life’s sword: maldición//malediction, bendición//benediction, doubled & edged…
The rectangular dish you brought home from Tokyo
broke clean—one corner snapped away from the blue-black lacquered whole, a long slender triangle like a gymnast in three-quarter split exposing raw bone of ceramic. Your response, a heavy…
Wood and Wool
1. You are wood, you are wool, you are the intricate skeleton of the desiccated leaf, of the dead dehydrated papyrus-bloom 2. you are simple as a scroll…