rain at the window. the searching arms of garden bamboo smear their flat leaves across the glass with each push of wind. my neighbor’s truck starts up in the…

  after the police report, i walked home over frost-killed camellia blooms, thick and meaty underfoot like severed red hands. this isn’t a story about all that. i’m thinking instead…

  Southern Black Superstitions remind me that it is bad luck to leave any hair in a comb or brush. After I’ve oiled my hair, I take the knotted brown…

  [corrido under a fort myers palm]   Flea market girl handed me a flyer for a big norteño brass band festival going down next weekend, here at Ortiz, featuring…

  [new thorns, 2020]   Pull the thorns from this borderline ’til barbed wire runs smooth against a palm, ’til coils of concertina fold back inside the accordion with a…

  [one for adán]   What ridiculous luck to even be born. What ridiculous luck, living long enough to sing how your father was murdered by false policemen. What ridiculous…

  Ninety-three years old, stains on either side exactly where it would have covered her hips, as if on the last day, she was making bread, staring out the window,…

  “Breastfeeding is a culturally and psychically fraught practice.” —Jennifer Friedlander, Subjectivity   We cry over spilled milk, yell shit at the elbow bump that puddles the pumped sweet gold…

  Because waking up in the hospital, handcuffed to the bed, charcoal staining my teeth, my face blue with death, was no fun. Because dressing up as a woman, learning…

  a ghost came to me once a specter shrouded in fog and stared at me through sunken mounds, lifeless caverns hollow like clay caved in by thumbs I don’t…

  Not the sense of standing alone in front of a microphone, but the adjustments of playing along with a more experienced band. Not the fear of representing an establishment,…

  What if you really had never heard it before? The throaty voice, the credibility And strength of a man who could always pick you up And bring you to…