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she saved her money to buy a thirty-minute trip back in time to visit the diner where she could watch her grandpa young with a head full of hair working behind the counter as she ate a piece of his maple apple pie with coffee the piece she ordered to-go traveled fifty years ahead […]
I don’t want flying cars. I want my language back. I want to glass-bottom boat my way to a dirt road with no street signs, squeeze myself on the grave of my restlessness, my atomic self-esteem. Five hundred years and we have finished. What have burned sugar and dyed cotton blighted? I […]
I run out of ways to keep you urgent in my mouth, stomach your shouting relic. so, when grief comes for an unburial unearthing you into the forgotten, I stuff you under my tongue. how I’ve learnt to carry you across borders, across turnpikes & racial diss. across the panting roadblocks, where we exist […]
Mountain pebble gripped in her beak, Jingwei flies over forest and field mile after mile after mile, she flies over rice farmers, over foresters over river fishermen who spot her shadow flying below them across a shadow sky over mouse and rat, hare and shrew, their thousand small and busy lives […]
The night before first snow in Zutphen the bathroom glass is piebald with frostbreath and djinns and this month you don’t trust electricity so I kneel in the tub to dredge the blood from between my thighs until my knuckles no longer trail burnt cherries and bicycle rust down the shower curtain I asked your […]
“what is grief, if not love persevering?”— Vision in a village, a woman on a boat tosses her net into a lake & hopes to fish her drowned kids from its yawning mouth. the dark garment in the sky is without sparkles, a halved moon hovers, & nothing but owls eat the silence. in Bini, […]
After the legend of 牛郎织女 It begins, perhaps unavoidably, with my mother’s anger. She caught me at happiness, you see. Unsanctioned. (I do not talk about my father. You cannot talk about a forest until you have emerged from the trees.) I met a boy. My mother told him, as she stripped […]
cracks always long to grow. asphalt craves other than the horizontal. you could become a poem. straight line caesuraed into a mouth. a ruin. a fucking statement. you were meant for so much more than conveyance or convenience. were primordial ooze once. could have kissed the ozone layer. made microplastic and endured millennia. were paved […]
for Nyani Martin You knew our strength, we were the maze’s clew coiling in your goddess’ fists, the sidewinding horns of the bull tossing dancers through copper-blue infinity. Son of serpent-footed kings, he should have twined his wrists with yours, not left them for the wild grape and the ivy to lasso into immortality, […]
I am haunted by her neoprene suit, the swell of undulations while the ocean kelps. In New Mexico I balked at white sun, my fleshy calves trembling when the puppeteer said, It’s either me or the seven seas. I crashed like a breaking […]
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