—From the Atomic Sonnets series
😯 :: { Every Bond You Break} & when they are all gone, the horses will open their great, great body. Two suns. One red. & one blue.…
{You Love Him— Don’t You—}
You love him, don’t you, & from zero, zero, zero. Like photons flitting in the abyss, only shall two Lay waste this world wretched &— x oh oh oh.…
Poet Wrestling with an Ode to Her Brother
—after The Cranberries I never made it through a single night. It wasn’t without design. The brxght. Brxght xyxs. & still the border. Night. ++++++Unfurls. +++:: &…
Against Sentimentality
I’m told I’m roller skating in the oldest punk house in America. I want to believe it, but I don’t. We all want to be the biggest, the best,…
This Unkindness
You’ve got to hand it to them, the ravens. They live just about anywhere—a garbage dump in the Mojave Desert, base camp on Mount Everest, or atop the water…
Extant/Extinct
Crush the cockroach but not the ant, not the bees buzzing by your palm about to press into mine, not the legs of centipedes caressing concrete, not…
What Creature
John swept leaves into a pile on the porch. Our neighbor turned the dirt of her balcony planters with her hand trowel and lined them with snakeskin—to scare…
The Beast I Worship
The hair coiled around the drain. I bent down and ++++++pulled its split-end. It was long, heavy. The drain gurgled. No, beneath the tub ++++++gurgled. Perhaps, from the…
Sonnet in Which My Cousins Try to Teach My Abuela How to Float
They hold onto her/ and tell her/ tranquila/ they tell her estamos aquí/ to breathe/ to let go/ of all tension/ and then/ they let her go/ and she…
This is an ode to forgetting
to take the tag off the pink polo shirt my abuela gave me for christmas/ to walking around with the tag hanging on/ sticking out/ like a typo/ this…
Sonnet for My Sadness or Self-Portrait as a Verb That Turned into a Noun
This is a self-portrait with a blueberry- flavored cigar that tastes like heaven but is probably/ no definitely/ hell for my lungs/ with a king james bible that tells…