Today I went looking for a word but it did not come looking for me so we remained lost to one another. I’ve not given up on what it…

  +++ —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…

  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…

  +++“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. &…

  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…

  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…

  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…

  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…

  +++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…

  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.…

  Again I watch a cousin           fitted for a wedding gown ++++++lace and strings tightened       across the back, whale elegy written across the spine          Fingers clasped around…

  I bury my bloody underwear in the trash out back where coyotes yip at night. When we talk about the girl who drowned in the reservoir on the edge…