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and they tell me my body is not the home they’re looking for, not the presidential suite—lavish décor, wine, freshly pressed linen sheets— but sweat-soaked, blood-stained mattress in the basement behind locked doors, covered in dust, abandoned, by everyone but myself. But sometimes, even I forget that beneath withered, wrinkled, time- stamped hands, there once […]
His spirit yet dances through the crowd. There, in graffiti refusing grey concrete. There, in the demonstrator’s eye. There, in the slogan splitting hearts. There, in the minister’s tweaked nose. Sang Kancil datang, Anjing raja ditendang. Slip bars, scurry from snares, sprint fine and unseen. No net or cage contains a trickster of his […]
i will always be more tomb than temple, i know. there are ghosts and gods reclining on the moth-eaten velvet of my tongue, tigers and thunders purring in my veins but— if you keep praising the curl of my eyelashes, comparing them to flying eaves / and if you keep tending to my collarbones […]
E = mc2 to C me, beginnings are hidden promises, unplanned, untested, did U plan me first? I hold the Singularity in breath I do not possess, in imagination I control, […]
the tracks are tumbling in a paunch. a boy left, a quarter devoured in a raw valley. a fading dream done to dust. the mystery charted in susurrations. he looked and we are many here. red trickle trickle stream. i’m losing how to keep this objective. & from the birds, the gasp. from the flames, […]
“Okay but what’s Sami?” Sometimes I take a breath, Make myself say the word Lapp— Then half the time they still don’t know. I’ve said it for nothing. Sometimes I find A way to say, in the far north. So they understand (but don’t care). Once I told a small child, “The reindeer people, sweetheart,” […]
nidikumba (that you may sleep each night soundly; that your nipples might flush fertile in the clutch of your matelove’s firstborn; that their fingers might furl feather quiet in your fist in the dark; that blossoms may light your bare feet to the ocean each morning, thorning your soles and begging that you tread gentle, […]
We step through mirrors and take you away. Don’t be afraid, it’s just business. Your soul or an eye, a lifetime or a night. You’ll be washed of your old fragrances: the midnight trysts and false promises, the cash payments and casual heartbreaks. The room where we’ll take you has a mirror. Peer […]
. . . the word not even Vergil knew, who died with his work unfinished. —Ursula K. Le Guin, “Learning Latin in Old Age” From his fever in Brundisium he visits like the wavering in bronze scratched grave-bound across its gods and heroes, the worried wick of a face still breathing light. Ceaseless as […]
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