Altogether we were / uncountable, and another / of us we abandoned / at the shore.

White emerges when all wavelengths of light reflect off an object with equal intensity, much like how white noise distributes its amplitude across its entire frequency range. Examples abound: running water, the whir of a fan, the hum of a vacuum.

And I realize that layered in pasta and ham, spinach and oats, maybe the food question is really a language of love, a question of intimacy — because what’s closer to a person than the food they eat?

In his memoir 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Robyn Hitchcock’s assembled a lovely, evocative, characteristically quirky portal back to that heady time.

Sweet teenage goths, come back / from evening’s municipal cemeteries / and haunt the living for a minute.

The kind of man Cathy imagined would pursue an eleven-year-old should be tall and fit. He ought to wear fitted washed jeans, his button-up sleeves rolled loosely. His fingers should be stacked with rings, and a tattoo should climb the side of his neck, his forearm or bicep. But the man who’d sought out Cathy was short and stocky. His pasty skin had a sheen that made it look extra malleable, like putty.

Skies have moods. We gave these / to them. Named the rivers. Imagine that.

An old man will watch us, openly / stare, two boys in a Nevada diner / leaning towards each other, a touch / too close.

I told myself it wasn’t my responsibility.  I told myself it wasn’t my fault, and grabbed my flannel off the back of the chair, the bag of scripts off the sink.  I found my jeans at the foot of the bed, my shoes, my cigarettes, and I walked out into the cold. 

In a third smoke session of the night sort of way I ask him / what’s the worst thing he’s ever done. He searches me for the / fish hook, says he was unfaithful-a few times-to the first girl he / loved.

Any moment the doctor / will knock—the wait suspenseful, caught / breath before a jump scare.

Enter: The Clown.

Suddenly, the building’s main door banged open. Something heavy was being lugged up the stairs. Kevin slid behind me and dragged open the apartment door.

"Once it's official, start packing. Submit two copies of your letter of resignation. One goes to your parents, for their records."

I have letters after my name, but they are profane, so I do not use them. The saints in the catacombs would rise up and declare me anathema if I did. But the transcript says what it says.

Lay the snapping turtle’s corpse / on a swarming ant hill, // return to it after the flesh / is joyously devoured.

"The fear of Death was spoon-fed to me— / the drear of black velvet drapes // over glossy wood coffins, heartbeats swallowed / but never digested."

The last story Milena gave me was unlike all the rest. In it, a girl stood trapped on the strip of land between a lagoon and the sea, the sky black overhead, the cranes out to get her.

Immigration, assimilation, and trying to make it in a country – especially one where the primary language is nothing like your native tongue – can be traumatizing. But I had suspicions that there were other reasons for all the trauma.
Obviously, there’d been the Korean War where a ghastly three to four million people had been killed, and before that the callous Japanese occupation, but what exactly had taken place during these events?

I never meant to raise my own children, not all the time, anyhow. Not like this. Some days I really miss John, but really what I miss is when people could seem like whole cities instead of swamps.

"the curse of my child who you will/ bury shallow in the ground without/ a second thought"

"America has never been a racist country ……………………………………… 15%"

What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone.

The food taster is fulfilled in her job in a way she knows most others are not. Something about this makes her uneasy. Something about this makes her ravenous for more.

She’d been so good at laying still. Good at being frightened. During one of her early jobs, a gig where she’d started off alive, breathing long enough to be assaulted, the man had been so careful, making an effort to talk to her between takes

The whole process was so joyful, and it always is, even when I'm writing about sad things. I think it’s joyful because the thing I’m making is actually helping me process my own experiences and perception.

Without trying, D and B are helping me understand the truth about forever—that it works both ways and travels the earth in all directions, thwarting all human attempts to move forward by going backwards.

I’m not interested in likability with characters. I am drawn to characters who are complex, contradictory, and very particular in the ways that they might exist in the world, and that they are capable of holding contradictory views. That is how I see people.

Not long before I started doing drag, I asked my friend Sai to teach me how to bind. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you’re busy. I just think I need your help.”

From my window, I watched the pool’s plastic pit return to its former glory. Only when the refurbishment was complete, the pool refilled and made usable, did I discover Cathy existed, that the dull-but-probably-well-to-do couple next door had a daughter the same age as Gretchen Lowe.

"don’t ya know i cried when you died / i say kinfolk you ain’t dead / in me you be alive awaitin ya second comin"

“Hello, old friend,” she whispered into the void. The fullness inside her swelled. She never imagined that she would have welcomed his well-armored companionship. But how different he seemed this time, a herald of harmony rather than hostility. A true friend. Oh, how good it was to see him.

"I care to understand,/ upon the backs/ of mother’s hands/ who cradle the scars of eastern sunrise,/"

Permanently installed in my mortal mind’s corner sits Mrs. Eddy, ram-rod straight on her wooden chair, dark hair pleated, expression severe, Victorian jacket battened down, white ruff protruding round neck and wrists.

Forget the original myth, its violence, its finality, your own complicity. What if--instead of dominion--this could be about tenderness?

My poetry is indeed heavily indebted to my studies in history, psychoanalysis, political economy, and critical social theory; but I find that, at times, only via poetry can I adequately express the gravity and intricacy of not just a given fact, but what I should (like to) do in light of that fact.

"I wander among abandoned houses,/ asking beggars and passersby near the rubble/ if they caught sight of a stray wish meandering around."

I still think it is essential to at least sometimes focus on aspects of Palestinian culture and heritage outside of the conflict with Zionists. Doing this shows that we are not only defined by the current suffering and brutality; it is definitely part of the Palestinian experience, but it is not all of it.

We walk straight toward the things we want or need or have to reach, leaving a wake of our longing in the bare dirt behind us. We roll our eyes at the olds’ advice to slow down, to “savor,” such corny bullshit, we’ll slow down, maybe, when we arrive.

My mother lit her first cigarette on waking. My father smoked himself to sleep at night. They smoked as we carved pumpkins, sang Christmas carols around the piano, dipped eggs into bright dye. They smoked in our bedrooms while they read aloud to my brother and me. My mother, a skillful and innovative cook, especially for the time, smoked while making dinner every night, an ashtray balanced on the back end of the stove, lighting cigarette after cigarette on the gas burners under simmering pots.

"...arms now/ berry-covered branch/ —how awfully/ they must ache."

A Gothic style is ideal for narrating the conquest of the West because it’s a horror story that continues to unfold. Horror tropes that have their roots in the Gothic are ideal mechanisms for that type of narrative.

After discovering antipodal points and remembering Australia, I immediately started digging. It made no sense to believe that I could dig through the core of the earth but it didn’t make any sense to live the way me and my family, my neighbors, were living: threatened and afraid all the time.

My doppelgänger smells like wet fur and Old Spice. Even when we’re sitting in the dry air conditioning of my Jeep Cherokee, the scent — heavy with notes of yeast and nutmeg — is overpowering.

Mirror, mirror on the wall / Look down in mercy / The wheel is fixed / In a lonely place

I adopted my father’s fears, but the fear on tap at church spoke to what felt like my native suspicions—that harm was gestating in me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. I learned to be in constant fear of my thoughts, lest something unforgivable dash across them at the very moment of the apocalypse.

Price is a difficult artist to box-up, for those so inclined. She’s lived in Nashville, Tennessee for decades, and has both courted and been denied Music City’s trappings. A dynamic study in contrasts, she grew up in rural Illinois but sings with a southern accent; her debut album was released on maverick Jack White’s Third Man Records, hardly a Nashville industry staple (though it may be on its way); she cut a live album at historic and revered Ryman Auditorium, waltzing (and rocking) within a storied tradition.

"The doctors call me ugly,/ draw over my bone structure,/ trace the routes where the/ coral will fuse."

“But here was evidence that maybe, if this ever did happen, I wouldn’t be able to scream or run out the door. That something—fear, disbelief, paralysis—might keep me right there, in place.”

A few times, he reached for her breast, but the moment his fingers collided with the skin of her chest she involuntarily felt herself disengage in surprise, as though shocked that this should be a place his hand might be inclined to rest, to explore

Scuttling toward me with the fat pink knuckles of her claws, assembled inside the shell I’d just thrown. Her body at home in the ugliness I’d created. She was my best friend instantly. I named her Henrietta.

Lousy: a permissible way to express displeasure, even contempt, without resorting to the verboten profane. Profanity, after all, could get you sent to your room, your mouth scrubbed out with soap, or worse if the Lord’s name was taken in vain. But lousy had a strange twist to it, a little corkscrew in the language that opened a different bottle.

I have always loved creating different kinds of characters from various generations, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic classes. I think it’s just a matter of doing those characters justice and treating them with empathy and compassion.

The hotel where I worked saw a pilgrimage then of portly old men with mustaches and cabbie hats, their stomachs tucked into ill-fit jeans. They came into the lobby weeping, clutching at their thinning hair like the oracle at Delphi, asking God or me or whoever else was in the room why this had to happen to those beautiful machines.

"My dad is not making it up, but art cannot/ leave freak beauties be. He will have to add more—/ a plastic bag snagged on a sapling’s ankle—"

To the best of my knowledge, unless you include women’s private photo albums or personal social media feeds, there is no Madonna with Gestational Diabetes, Madonna of the Amniocentesis, or Madonna of the IV Tower and Labor and Delivery Room. I feel kinship with these images that portray the complexities of being pregnant. They challenge the demands for silence and censorship around experiences that do not follow the prescribed, imposed narrative of a joyful and celebratory pregnancy. These images revolve around loss, distress, powerlessness, a beauty often called grotesque, and, despite all its astonishing advances, a medical system that sometimes leaves more questions than answers.

"how do you play hand games with ghosts/ expect souls to hopscotch the river styx/ let favorite toys become grave markers"

“Breathe, dawg,” I declare to one hand-length worm. Because I want everyone and everything I love to breathe.

"the only one/ whose shore has shifted, flesh expanding from one bone/ to the next. A jagged coast…"

"We run as one, staunch, impassive, each of us different, all the same: bay, roan, pinto, palomino, as many types as there are dreams imaginable but we rush as one array, jet-like above the gravely ground at horse-speed, a single panoply that thrusts forth in perpetual motion and straight pursuit, headlong into pitiless wind"

"When I spoke, I surprised myself by saying things I had been too bashful to admit to the aquifer before. I gushed. I waited for her response. The water enveloped me."

"I think art holds the power to shift and multiply perspectives, which the world desperately needs right now. Single-mindedness is dangerous. What I love about poetry in particular, is its capacity of subversion, of dissent, against ideas but also against language itself, as language and ideas are intertwined."

At age eight, you watched an episode of Full House about dieting: D.J. eats ice pops and hangs pictures of thin models on her fridge; you know this is to bring awareness to the dangers of extreme dieting, but you keep these as techniques instead.

“Don’t cut the tongue—torn
strips conform smoother to the mold.”

Sally’s dresses were too big, they swallowed us, gobbled us up, we tied the cords too tight and they left these great, swooping Xs across our bodies. The day was drawn, frigid, there were goosebumps running across our arms. But Sally wasn’t there and couldn’t say anything. Sally was dead.

The most frequent and famous of the stories sent to me wasn't about a Florida man but a Florida woman. A twenty-something former-model-turned-meth-addict, she'd been responsible for burning down a 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree which, at the time, was considered to be the oldest of its kind and the fifth oldest tree globally.

"what you choose to see is up to you..."

I think artists and writers are really important in terms of addressing the climate crisis. Everybody, ultimately, is important—it’s an all hands on deck kind of situation—but artists and writers have the ability to make sense of a problem that otherwise seems vast and intangible.

I hardly dared open my mouth, even to say something innocuous like “Sure, I’m hungry. I could eat dinner.” My words might be analyzed to reveal something knotty, something sinister I didn’t know I felt but really ought to know I felt.

When you become invisible, as widows do, you welcome opportunities to reappear.

because you left a good-bye note written on paper made of mummies.

My wife kept to her alcove. I kept to my nook. The elephant played between us.

If you are going to stare. If we must be so visible. I want you to know some of the depth, the multitude, the layers of us.

Even when his poems take a darker turn, such as recalling the murder of a friend and colleague, or the bittersweet memory of a childhood crush who has since passed away—there are moments of true grace within these elegies—a slowing down, not in pacing but in memory’s leaps.

I stay alive though, sensing velocity
as an ambulance would in a dream—
brisk, accidental. Remember the first time
your little bones cried for milk?

I imagined my giant Scrabble board and a pile of letter tiles. Extra vowels, too many U’s. Searching. Wanting to make sense of where I was at with my mom and where she was with herself. Do my memories get erased too when she erases hers?

Dick Clark’s face revolving, revolving. This is no fever dream. 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll came packaged with a 'special bonus record,' a cardboard flexi disc emblazoned with, naturally, Clark’s cheery face. The record plays at 33 1/3 rpm, and in an unnerving design bug the spindle hole nailed Clark right between his eyes.

This is how we broom. How we gather dust. A modified ritual of palimpsestic movement. Ceremony in cipher. How we move in the old ways that remain beyond a centuries-long violence.

I’m here tonight because a week ago I woke up and discovered that my inner thighs had started turning white. Not chalk-white. White-girl white.

You forgot that this is home sweet home and the shelves have a hundred different cereal boxes.

In this country, a man could be lost and no one would know enough to grieve, not even his own mother.

I hardly dared open my mouth, even to say something innocuous like “Sure, I’m hungry. I could eat dinner.” My words might be analyzed to reveal something knotty, something sinister I didn’t know I felt but really ought to know I felt.

Rage is a thing that has to be birthed, because we do so much course correction – or at least my experience has felt like, at multiple times, someone has done something anti-Black to me, someone has done something racist, homophobic, transphobic, and I feel, in that moment, I can’t react the way that I want to.

We all know that this is because they recognize pain and want to do something. None of us have to name it.

“Your mother is afraid of lizards. This is a constant. In the present or the past, she is always afraid of lizards. When you were a child, one crept in the house when your father was out, probably getting high––though you cannot blame everything on addiction. He might have been working.”

My cousin is late. And handsome. And very late. And, technically, not my cousin. But sex would be complicated, and he’s probably a virgin, and his English is not so good, so I let it go.

They sprouted leafy tufts around their necks, their feet took on a moldy sheen, their toenails were atrocious. You couldn’t keep these children inside.

Why is it
when we die,
We always remember most
the song from our childhood?

I could not have explained this to my mother, but I was uneasy in those moments. The kitten was so tiny, and caring for her felt so serious. I tried in that first week to come up with the perfect pet name, one that would reflect her too-big coat and her shy meow, but I couldn’t. I think I felt unqualified for the job.

Davis is like an actor who saw their scalp on-screen and paid to get hair plugs only for the show to be canceled before its second season ever got to air.

“Hema immediately wanted to please him. Theo was black-haired, handsome in a vulpine way, stocky and muscular, yet agile, and a little older than Kai. He was French, and played professionally in London for ten years before coming to the United States. He’d played for France’s soccer team in 1998 when they won the World Cup. He wanted the girls he coached—girls like Hema—to be tough and fierce, to be consummate sportswomen.”

this King & Kennedy country
that fast draws
that kills slow

A horse can grow a stone in its stomach the size of a grapefruit.

"I think we grapple with those stories we cannot reconcile by writing them again and again, maybe each time with different 'others' in mind, and for a future people we hope to touch."

the justifiable fears
of waking from an American fantasy of arrival
in places that require defense, let him go.

The woman went abroad and began to lose her grip on things.

“One never changes the past, Roshelle says. Fundamental misunderstanding. Each incarnation of reality must be internally consistent—that is, if one goes backward in time, it’s not a disruption of the plan; it’s what always happened.”

Erasure: Not the 80’s brit-pop band, although we do enjoy “A Little Respect,” (not quite a cover of Aretha’s version, but a nice alternative).

they
said it was uncivil but not a crime, it is never a crime when
you die; should I begin from the beginning should I add the women,
Renisha, Rekia, Chantel, Tyisha, Yvette, Gabriella, Miriam, Jessica

Just so, for a decade or two, the family before the TV had watched one life as they waited for another. Meanwhile sputterings flew every way from both.

AT SOME POINT, all nerves get old. The body cannot regenerate in ways it is accustomed to doing.

why do I devour myself/yet continue to grow new leaves?

Rocky is a myth in the air between
us untrue things this American
dream

Sometimes my daughter and I become wolves, just the way we were when she was born.

That look in her eyes. That look she’d gotten in church after Dad. Eyes like before a stormy wave crashes on a sailboat, when you know you’ve tried it all and you’re done done done.

A man sings for pesos,/on the corner, his hand/ swarmed by a song of bees

A honey bee knows the outcome of haste and yet, she is here, in the light. She lives fully, either always in fear of, or without fear of, death attached to her actions.

They cut the tongues out quickly, cleanly, like a wire through wet clay.

He sticks his hand in his pocket for a brush but pulls out melted gray taffy instead. He thinks, can only think, of that painted tree in the rain.

I will give him this bird trapped in a doorway,
a mad heart in feathers and pulsing eyes.

In the bottom of the third, he called back. He was slurring. He was somewhere downtown. He didn’t know where. He was sitting on concrete steps. He could see bushes. Where are you in relation to the big Bank of America building, I asked. He didn’t know. Concrete steps, he kept saying. Bushes.

I break eye contact and focus on the road. There is nothing but asphalt and leveled plains. Something scrapes behind me, and I know you’ve hit bone. 

Empurpled, if caught in the gloaming, before the beam sharpens against true night and reddens the dot into super clarity.

The doctor is a wide, rectangular man with side-parted lank brown hair, black-framed glasses, and an untidy mustache. I sit across from him, next to Dan, on the shiny blue cushion of a dark-wood-colored chair. We are at a fertility clinic because we are trying to conceive a baby and our bodies do not work.

A slow/ soiling exponentially catches fire. Myth as warning. A myth stays with us, despite our/ forgetting.

Plain bird whose one song is all songs. / Who accompanied me once / while I waited and waited and no call came / and who, for god's sake, will not stop singing now.

My first pieces were our letters and notes to each other, our photographs, and the boxes full of journals I read through, one by one. Once I put it all together, it felt significant. As I collected them, it felt like a scavenger hunt.

Which is to say that you can essay about anything, find some small hook in the overlooked or takenforgranted.

Soon enough, living in a house that did not connect on any real level with the surrounding community--its assumptions, laws, and dialogues--I figured the best way to exist in a fragmented reality and abide by its dissonance was to make myself a fragment, a live sliver of what I might otherwise have been physically, spiritually, mentally or intellectually, a job I had done well by age fifteen...

You won’t believe me, but an angel visits me in my dreams.

Her bones had been bleached, stripped of all muscles and tendons, and you called me to your side as though I were your own.

The simple act of having your rights to liberty and expression, I would say. The simple act of not being scared to say what you are thinking.

But, if you didn’t think about that, didn’t think about the unreality of everything, it was great. I couldn’t have said how long I played Steer Rope, or how many steers I managed to rack up. For me, the whole point was not to think.

“You tell us death, and you tell us pain, and you tell us there are good things, too.”

I see a woman running towards me at the farthest edge of the path between Jimi Hendrix and Sam Smith parks. She's light on her feet, but tense, taut, and I feel that she's familiar.

In petticoats, ribbons, and ostrich plumes,
with watch chains, snuff boxes, and monocles,
we were enchanted individuals
last night, cinderellas without our brooms.

Molten steel fills my ribcage,
my teeth are barbed-wire,
but the killer bees I want to spit
are stuck on the flypaper of my tongue.

"People expect mammals to smile and frown, to have expressive eyebrows, and to make certain gestures with their hands, arms, and front legs. Drawing flightless birds frees me from so many expectations and gives me more space to play."

There are echoes of a childhood and a boy I can just barely remember. There has been an ache in my stomach for me to return.

“The children stare into space. No one here knows what too much means.”

" then woman, not in the way of suffering or resentment, but in the way of queer and of magic. take a fistful of dirt and poof."

None of this was ever a problem before, but sitting there looking at that pee stick, it hit me: if I was going to have to explain the world to someone else, it was a huge problem. I had nine months to learn everything. More like eight, really.

Bones tell stories. They hold intangible memories.

Of time, there’s this: the pink stripes around the neck in the mirror after, which was the most surprising—as if to mimic the sky was as simple as pulling its color into one’s cheeks.

Climbing can be an enticing pursuit for writing because a climb is a natural story… Basically, anytime you go on a climb, even if it’s just a backyard climb, you’re tracing a narrative or the form of a narrative arc with your hands and your feet.

When our habits deform our bodies, we can’t hide the proof of what we do.

"I can see the singer looking hopefully at the person with whom he’s speaking, seeing the kindness in their shining eyes, understanding the words they offer yet singing, in that eternal melancholia of melody, the real truth."

but at some point in every dream I end up scraping my teeth out of my mouth

So you loved men who combusted, / spontaneously gave yourself to the flammable, / stripped yourself bare / for their ovens, splayed yourself for their driptorches.

She drinks to forget and drinks to feel different in her skin. She drinks to be someone else and drinks because she feels things she isn’t supposed to feel – because she is Black and Christian and because her parents raised her better.

I imagined his spidery fingers hovering over his phone all night, at once touching and not touching it like the soft spots of my body.

My headlights are on. They carve small spaces into the night. I want to shed this skin and curl myself into their void. I want to tuck myself into their cold. I want to be consumed by their nothingness. I want to be swallowed whole, too.

All/ day you’ve been plunking rusted metal / into your purse, and I never stopped to / ask what you really wanted

Of course, this isn’t the witch-thick forest you read about in a fairytale. I am surrounded by green, fast-growing trees and shrubs—buckthorn and black locust and honeysuckle—relentlessly spreading along the banks of the stream. The trunks bow out over the water and form a canopy of shade.

"i hold a tissue paper body/ as long as i can, / or until i must exhale."

In the weeks leading up to my friend’s wedding, instead of studying for the GRE, I’d made mental tallies of people I dreaded but could reasonably expect to see in Poland.

How much have I spliced into my memory?

I have always come to both reading and writing from a somewhat genderless space. What I mean is that both writing and reading have been mechanisms for me to try on different lives and experiences.

"What do you say to someone who has been gone for so long."

She thought she knew of everything that could happen to the human heart, it seemed most of it had happened already to her mother.

You stand there silently, breathing candy breath into your mask until your face gets damp. Your best friends are cheerleaders, witches, fairies. But you’re just a structure of a person, an outline of a body, quiet and haunted.

"The first will make you numb, but you’ll be thin so everyone will tell you how good you look and that should equate happiness, or at least not wanting to die."

We didn’t have friends on board. We didn’t have friends of friends on board. And we hadn’t ever even been to Miami, or to Brazil. So we went about our day. We made coffee.

Death reminds me too much of myself./ I mean, if you watched an animal die/ in agony, would you still enjoy eating its flesh?

Jack looked at his own two feet dangling over the giant's shoulder. He thought about how small he was next to the giant, beside the sea.

"What we think is a really small, isolated place turns out to be the center of somebody else’s world."

After work, we meet in the park near your office to swap shadows.

Tamogotchis are everywhere in middle school, cradled in our hands during math when we learn about angles and remainders, the goal to take what is whole and break it apart. The egg buzzes several times a day as a reminder that survival is not guaranteed.

Angelenos call the phenomenon of swarming water bees
a congregation as in a church

Lisa will not sit down, will not shut her eyes any longer than it takes to blink, because when she does, she has learned, her muscles begin to release and the room lilts gently from one side to the other and she cannot trust her arms to keep hold of her baby.

The voice to which I’m only half-listening sounds familiar, but something’s off, also. I look up blankly from the records I’m riffling through and realize that I’m hearing Elton John, one of his well-known hits from the early seventies, but I haven’t heard this version before.

Jags can be time-consuming. And then there is the problem of satisfying its animalistic nature. Especially since tonight is Friday night, and you are going out.

The women who raised me were plain./ Devout./ Called whores if they rouged their cheeks/

Did so many women come in with babies growing inside them that Jesus acknowledged that plural? Or was it just a nice Southern thing? Like the French “vous,” used in singular formal to show respect to elders?

my spine curved/ into a question mark, my pen sketching symptoms/ on an empty man's silhouette.

You’d paid the fourteen dollars (plus tax and service fees), sure that it was going to be in the main theater with the red fabric seats and gold façades on the ceiling. It made you feel classic. Instead, you sat in what could have been someone’s at-home projector room with ten other people, all waiting to watch a biopic about Princess Diana.

Our Breath./ They took what was theirs.

On the other hand, I hated the port. It turned me into a cancer machine. It frightened me, too. I couldn’t look at it. So I asked Carol to make a portrait.

I didn’t know there would be anesthesia. I didn’t know there would be blood. I didn’t know my arm would bruise Rorschach. I didn’t know the army greens and deep blues would last so long.

The point is, I could die at any moment with two living parents who would choose some tacky, pink, heart-shaped granite headstone for my grave and write Beloved Daughter on it with the emblem of a cross or some other religious symbol above my name, and that is not happening.

I think it’s important for writers to rediscover wonder. Without wonder, writing becomes stagnant and preachy. If you haven’t found your place of wonder yet, think about the kinds of spaces that make you ask questions, that make you see in a new way.

We started spending less time at the park, arriving home while sunlight was still on offer and confusing our parents. We paid more attention to who showed up in the park and who didn’t. Absences now felt like defections, lessening our numbers and making us vulnerable in a way that tightened our stomachs when we thought about Hansen.

I know my house is a woman because she has a migrating trap door. I’m in the hallway. Whoops! I’m in the kitchen. I’m in the basement. Whoops! I’m in the attic. I can see the door’s outline if I pay attention and it’s possible to tiptoe very carefully around its edges, but it is easy to get distracted in the house.

Children are backlogs / in the isolation tent

the raw energy of / threat

I think part of writing into myth and folklore is that there’s this kind of cosmic presence, this feeling that people are people, but they’re also more than people in a way. There’s something about them that is incredibly ancient and powerful.

On the toilet, a new mother discovers her head is full of cement. She drips red and yellow, squirts herself with water and lidocaine, and feels the wet cement chunks coating her throat and lapping the backs of her eye sockets.

We both know how our mom feels about us bringing things home, things we find. Strange things, she calls them. Once, I showed her this quarter I’d picked up at school. I found it in the lunchroom. I said, Look! And, gasping hard, she slapped it from my hand.

For months now, you have not been able to walk through the daily din into the madness, and your life has felt more textured, your days fuller, though you will not admit that you might be happier this way.

Because you remember your teachers, one with wild eyes who wore a cross over his tie, who made algebraic equations turn and spin in your head, who gave you a graduation gift of Genesis in Space and Time…

You are still learning the subways and have to ask someone which way is south once you exit the train at Lafayette; the dot on your phone is being difficult.

How industrious and cheerful we appear, opening/ the water back up to the sky,

It's love in a silent spell/ tinkering in separate rooms

Thinking myself a nurturer of wonder and awe, I never summoned the simplest truth. This was the Tooth Fairy. This was Santa. Like amassing a grotesque ball of knotted tangled twine, I stretched and contorted tales beneath a guise of creating a magical childhood.

I have no discernable personality. Is that harsh? I don’t think so. My prescription makes me incapable of harsh, even to myself. I’ve been worn down smooth, plus a shave extra—less steadying than reversal.

There was a last time, of course, inside the little red house, like a last time for everything, except most of the time you don’t know it will be the last, which is why you don’t remember it, only the accumulation of trains rumbling just outside...

...witnessing the necessary work / of decomposing, composting, nature cycling, / until one day...

We came to learn how to heat up the earth to cool down the sky. On the first hot day of a scorching summer, we drove in two vans, eight PhD candidates and two professors from the University of Illinois, two hours south of campus to the enhanced geothermal testing system at the research institute outside Flat Rock, Illinois.

Poets are all of us — poet and not poet — building a bridge of poems with our hearts and minds and hands and languages.

Ten degrees and it’s night, painted stars/ adorning my flask.

The sound splices my lips in bitten denial

Now that I’ve stopped, I have more time to think about things like rocks, slightly less for thinking about self-loathing.

The metal tube growls around you like a mechanical dragon with an empty belly. A voice over the intercom reminds you not to shiver as you’re being digested.

Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.

She wonders if the dead still think of the living. She knows the living are fixated on the dead.

Where do things go when in their leaving, /when they're uprooted and carried/ somewhere else?

At the bottom of the box, amidst the impossibly small pearls of sugar and sharp crumbs, you will never find what you are looking for. Nothing will make you see things differently. But you will never stop searching.

I wear/ my drab green gown and listen/ to the insecurities of the nurses.

a trembling/ of finches, for example: flung down/ a coal mine/ if she returns to me/ i am safe to remain

Amid the maize and sugarcane fields, the village looked like a collection of cupboards painted white and left out to dry in the wind. Barking echoed over cactus and discarded glass bottles. Sunday mornings in San Juan Camotlán were usually quiet as a broken-down motorbike.

It was like the old days—the earliest days—those chatrooms where lines of text concealed everything except your wit or the way it unraveled but they had already unraveled, now that everyone was home-bound except those who didn’t and got caught by the authorities and everyone wanted that job.

When we first started dating, we’d stay up past sunrise doing nothing but blah blah blah, but then the Sad Thing crept in, and my husband refused to speak. The silence in our house is making my ears shrink, I swear. I stick a cue tip in and each day it swirls a little smaller. One day it won’t fit at all.

The plane lands, I look out the window and see the outdoors spinning upside down, round and round. I’ve woken up in another century, somehow sittin’ next to my beloved grandparents.

Something that I’ve really had to tell myself when writing this book was: You have to rip the Band-Aid off. You have to look at the wound for what it is. The genre of memoir—as hard as it sounds—thrives on suffering and it lives on vulnerability.

By day, she sprinkled into the river alfalfa blossoms and quail feathers and hollow flutes of cattails and tiny shells and smooth skipping stones—offerings to protect her family—chanting incantations of please please please.

I’ll release it amongst my mother’s hollyhocks and tomato plants and watch it shudder away through the grass, feeling like some dark corner of myself is going with it. I’ll resume my search for something lethal.

We box in the park and when we hit, our first faces crack and shatter. Underneath, now, I see his second face. Narrow and deep.

She poured coffee from her thermos and pulled herself closer to the microphone as her cue neared. 'Nina the Nightfly here, with tunes to get you through the long dark night. My lines are open, so call me up and tell me what's on your mind. I bet I've got a song that'll fit how you're feeling.'

A pigeon. The LED on its collar blinks. Kendra cups its body the way she holds her coffee to warm her hands. The message tied to its leg is unanswered.

We had become fish in time. I smelled my shirt. It smelled like fish, like fry. It smelled like where we had been.

We supposed / you were / mute, or / dying. We threw you / to / wolves; / they / didn't want / you.

Fog can be an atmospheric condition or / a type of bewilderment— / I am asked to think of ways / In which I can keep it / From settling

My mother chose to place his lungs in rice long before the doctors decided to / tease the tumor. Let the grains pull
out the chicken stock from its veins long before she stopped / cooking. My father was a quiet man.

In Stinktown, we scavenged for trash. That was our big industry. We’d sift through huge mounds of garbage, searching for stuff we could use for trading purposes.

If I can line up visuals that allow you to connect to your grief, your anger, and imagine an alternative life force, while allowing you your own autonomy in thought, that feels far more consensual than me telling you what you should see, feel, do.

They say this is the age of monster hunting, and we are the monsters: mothers and daughters, heroines and crones. The stench of us riles them. The sight of us sets them to howling.

shut / off the lights climb back / into bed place a pillow / under your knees ask / forgiveness

At recess we didn’t move our feet on the playground. What was the point? Some of us rubbed the tattoo under our arms like chimps, or rubbed the spot just above the belt line, scratched the back of our shoulders where wings would grow.

A satisfied end eludes me / The hysteria of locution becomes me / Charred brain crowded and crowned / with fleshy angles feeding / of the mouthparts, crazed

We walked around the neighborhood like the queens that we were. We licked our fingers and touched our asses. Our fingertips sizzled the moment they hit the denim. We smoked cigarettes behind the shed, then took long showers and brushed our teeth, even our tongues, to get the smell off.

It catches me, the smell: this ocean drift, tinged with salt. Pungent as seaweed. Sulfurous, perhaps. And for a moment I’m brought back in time: the smell of Galt Drive, Fort Lauderdale, 1983, and the cream-colored pants that my grandfather wore to his chest.

The men believed they were the shark. They saw it as a mirror: on one side, power taut behind silvery skin; on the other side, hard teeth inside predator’s mouths. Their incisors were remnants of a shark-life. The slick of their lips were meant for water.

Gone. The farm was gone, too. And the castle. All that remained were his vague memories of that other life and his magical self that had lived it. That missing self knew his fairy godmother.

They had never had a playground like that. They had had to work from a young age and played with rocks and sharp pieces of wood. Their lives had been hard, and it was difficult to see children whose lives were so lucky.

I know I am not empty -- life inside me / is grit and blood and a light buried in / sinew which has made me this star

He stood tall. His posture and leotards emphasized incredible physicality, as if his muscles’ muscles had muscles. With his hair slicked back and chin held high, he oscillated, projecting zero visible confusion—the antithesis of our expression.

Constructing the book is a device for me as a writer to enter it more fully. I like to drop myself in. If I’m there mid-sentence, mid-story, if everything is kind of jumbled, then maybe I can catch the momentum that I had previously and continue on riffing.

Does the girl’s desperation feed the thing’s obstinance? Years ago someone (one of the experts?) told the girl that she’s in control; she has choices. But how can that be when occasionally , no matter which button the girl pushes, the thing takes actions paradoxical and perverse?

When I think of ethnopoetics and the poem as a house, I am immediately drawn to ecopoetics, the ecotone, the edge-things, the house that moves, the shape of something inhabited, like a shell, empty, then full. Too full. Sometimes binding, if it isn’t time to be bound.

I found the flyer outside the grocery store. Feeling lonely? Ghosts for hire! I would’ve thought it was a prank if I hadn’t been seeing ghost children helping the elderly check expiration dates on bagged granola or deceased personal trainers floating alongside runners, cheering them on.

whole plums hang rotund from heavenly branches / puckered fruitless / bruised but beloved on the kitchen table /

And so it came to be that on that first night, parked on the roadside gravel abutting Hale’iwa Ali’i Beach Park, across the street from million-dollar homes, with the necessities of life stripped to the bone, my nerves humming with a new kind of freedom, the orange glow of street lamps fractured through Frosty Diamonds into scintillating sunbursts unlike anything I’d seen before.

I remember the neighborhood shrieking in summer, / kids dripping popsicles the color of blood onto hot concrete / & wondering how his voice would cut the air / when I finally heard it. You can always have another

She wasn’t listening. My mother had always been a wonderful listener. Now that she was dead and only a part of my dreams, mother had a bit of a foul mouth and didn’t listen well.

I might say last August was a faded blue, like a pair of blue jeans worn to softness.

The beets knew what they were doing; Kimbark was patsy perfect. He was a visitor in his father’s house, which was a remarried house with a new mom, new brother, and fruits and vegetables.

Among the many Monti possessions, all belonging to the Contessa, none was so highly prized as the Palazzo Principio, a magnificent Renaissance building that sat along the Arno, a stone’s throw from the Ponte Vecchio. Beautifully restored and as large as an entire city block, the Principio was said to be the most valuable privately-owned building in all of Florence.

Sometimes families fall apart. It’s not always the Brussel sprouts’ fault. One kid loves cauliflower. Another loves kale. That third baby that no one knew about might have loved broccoli but you will never know whether or not just as you will never know how many cc’s there are in broccoli.

I am grass and root and loam. A vole tunnels in my throat. / Field mice bed inside my womb. Hair, limbs, / fingers lengthen and rise, lengthen and slender into turkeyfoot / and stands of Indiangrass.

Time passed. The boy grew older. Taller. Able to reach all the way inside the freezer whenever he felt like it, which wasn’t often. Most of the time, he could find whatever he wanted in the refrigerator.

When life feels chaotic, it makes me feel better to remember that it is; everything is depressing, but cover it in flowers.

We would lie on her bed with our legs up on the white wall eating saltines / with butter while we made a list of everything we wanted. / Try to keep your hunger, someone said when she died in the summer. / I ate flour and bone. Measured the distance between two cups on the table.

The mother bit the very tiniest tip off the snake’s tail. It tasted metallic and felt tough between her teeth. Then, she tossed the snake into a stand of privet hedge.

I came around to the idea of this book being a lot like the storytelling I would do in early romantic relationships, when I wanted so badly to share my whole whole world with this person who felt vitally important to me, who I couldn’t wait to have fully immersed in my life and the world I’d known.

She paints roses under heavy skies. Purple, / the color of bruised plums. The artistry is in knowing / her audience, their heart-beaten stutter riding / on airbrushed waves.

Prerequisite: A hunger for written words. Remember how your mother wanted you to stay in school?

He looks at me so suddenly that I return to my body in pins and needles. For a moment there, I’d forgotten I exist.

I gift you rough ditches / where I search for purple fists / of thistle. I suck hard / the sweet petals like spears / all the way down / to the stinging white heart.

It’s perfectly normal to imagine becoming a Football Star. Your imaginations need so much practice for where we will be taking you. “The Possible” is as important to imagine as “The Real” you think you see.

“You have to understand—the Women were hungry, angry, trying to survive—that this is what happens when a Maker cannot love their own creations,” mother tried to explain. Beloved, i would gaze at the invading Women, at their sallow eyes and ruptured hearts, and see only monsters. Perhaps this was why i did what i did.

What happened in that pause? Did the driver consider his own attractions? The features he desires in a woman, or even a man? Did he consider how little control he had over those desires?

Every night the man came home and saw the progress his wife was making on the mirror. Somehow she found just the right place for each shard, the right edges to slide alongside one another.

When the decision letters came, he didn’t even open a single envelope from the Cali schools. He believed the East was where the heart of the country resided. Surely, people there would notice his intellect and talents. Surely, they would give a shit about the stuff he was passionate about.

What is a lover in hat and scarf at the stove when dead / is the roadmap? He asks me for something unexpectedly beautiful, like a poet / might, so I leave my stone home for the garden.

Blank space skips a generation. / I don't know from art or what I lack. At the funeral / her children fought over last rites and good china. / I said nothing, so got only boats.

The kids say things behind his back when he makes them stand at attention at the start of class. He has three classes at once; there are too many kids and all he’s trying to do is keep them under control. His strictness is read as meanness, but he only looks angry because his transition lenses are taking too long to adjust to the bright Florida sun.

You will show no signs of weaknesses. There is power in your womanhood. You of pants on a first date, of fight classes, of weaponry.

they want a corpse, / a girl who'll only grow / skinnier with rot. A girl / who will disappear / into a handful of dust.

She longs / for the feeling of slipping / between fresh sheets & lying there / like a clean corpse.

I never learned. In a year’s time, Mother, Buck, and the chicken coop were gone. Aunt Betty bought chickens already drawn at the meat counter. I thought a lot about beheadings.

The whole institution seemed to exist by and for men, particularly male musicians, and more particularly male musicians who’d fully bought into the fantasy of rock and roll, which essentially resembles the kind of up-all-night debauchery romanticized in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical Almost Famous.

I know it seems odd that that long, strong bone in the leg can think, let alone feel, but it was still part of me, and as it lay in the bed, night into day and day into night, all it could wonder was, with so much of me gone, why hadn’t it been enough?

Kink has a more expansive meaning. … Kink as just that, sexual kinkiness. Kink as, the kink in Black folks’ hair. Kink as, a kink in the system. Kink as in, broke. So, I play off all the different ways that kink is a thing that we think about.

These images commingle now in memory as my first headlong descent into the strangeness of grief.

the small birds stepping like dames / through the green aisles, / and the strawberry plants blushing / on the garden floor-- / I've never known another place / as animal for longing.

The sun bathes the front of the shop in a new white light as he readies to open. A small gray bird has made its way in somehow, slamming itself repeatedly against the big spotless window and he uses a broom to gently prod it out the propped-open door to freedom.

He tried to form a band with a group that included my high school boyfriend, but kicked them all out of his house when they didn’t take the music as seriously as he did.

They want answers. Did the man explode? Can a man explode? Why have you said nothing? Why is the press silent too? The man with the megaphone climbs a fence and calls to the police station.

I keep hoping a storm will come and sweep away all this clutter, all these dollhouse messes.

Memory doesn’t work like writing, one word at a time, one ant in a line. It’s more like a science-class filmstrip on fire in the projector, one image blooming orange-white and black into another.

i brush my cheek with a lover so bewildered by kissing, he detonates / my clenched gristle instead. in red honey clothes, i am similar flesh / & you know new lovers: always making do.

For me, the way that I’ve learned to access faith or my relationship with God is primarily through poetry. It is this dynamic, ongoing process, and I think that that’s the way that faith has to live in me.

we forced open small holes and planted / their delicate bodies, covered / the white network / of translucent roots. / We watered them and waited.

Monica felt her soul leaving her body. It traveled up into the organic, free-range rafters, then looked down at Monica, and laughed and laughed.

Get out of the house, they said. Do something. Make something. Be something. They knew, they understood. But it was time, they said. We’re just trying to help, just looking out for you, just trying to help you move on, carry on, get through it, over it, past it.

we forced open small holes and planted / their delicate bodies, covered / the white network / of translucent roots. / We watered them and waited.

Mostly, I marveled at the sound the ring made against the floor—it was a persistent, golden tone that hovered in the air while splitting it. Even decades after I’ve forgotten Damien’s face and voice, I can almost see that sound, can picture that particular vibration in the air.

I stopped by the gas station to pick up Christie’s favorite slim Capri cigarettes, two packs. When you were dying, cigarettes and calories didn’t matter.

As if to interrupt the growing rift in mine and Don's own relationship, the swearing and physical brawls, broken lamps and TV remotes, Don's cousin made the leap to split with her boyfriend, and so she asked for a little help getting back onto her feet.