At first, I didn’t see it: the natural slowdown of cars, the respect. To me, it was rush hour, interminable. Two men on motorcycles wearing neon green vests branded…

  If loneliness is this—the loss of sight that comes of looking directly into sun, or the hand that gives shade, the one that hangs over someone’s eyes like the…

  Rufus Porter’s nephew and the man called Paine drew a line for the horizon and stenciled in the trunks and branches of the trees on the plaster walls, made…

  Let’s have a leading lady whose thighs touch Like a mother’s loving squeeze, A lead who has to carry baby powder In her purse for chafing. A damsel who…

  “Ass so fat you can see it from the front.”—Yasiin Bey At Auntie Anne’s pretzel hut A teenager with cratered Pockmarked acne declares That ass is like the moon—…

  1 So, you’re from China, and write poetry, in English? Often, people who don’t know me ask. Yes, I say, I make them short, so fewer mistakes. Sometimes I…

  cento* I live, as the river does, in a mystery— wedged in the middle of stars, roses in bloom, penstemon, the wet branches of an oak in winter— where…

+++ (An In-titled Poem)* +++ no nerve-ending ever not riven, +++ i revert to over-genuine, eerie-tongued venting… +++ i regret needing order— +++ never intend to get urgent, indigent: +++…

  There’s a firefly in the house. I tried to catch him and return him to the long grass of the unmown lawn, but he slipped through my fingers and…

  This is the side hustle: +++++++++I eat their dead’s past indiscretions, maybe ++++++++++++++choke a little on the crumbs. +++++Then I go home, +++++++++make mac & cheese for my kid,…

  In the field near my house, a horse grazes in his own shadow. All week I thought again of wanting to die. I watch the sun hit the fence…

  What I didn’t suspect about war is that there’d be music Not the kind that compels you to move in harmonious discord with the others Nor the kind that…