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I met a woman on the platform, handbag pressed tight To her chest like it might protect her. She kept her distance, And I’m not one to converse uninvited with the damned, Even when we share a fate. “Long day,” she sighed first, And I replied, “Long day.” (Or was it the echo of a third […]
They’re just now getting used to not having to be seen all the time, you know. When the first woman goes into the dressing room, she imagines that she’s drowning, that fabric will try to eat her whole just like her designer said it would, that maybe she should get used to being a soft […]
after Sinead Overbye the way the days are peeling away now is the same way they did before we got here. yesterday, i bumped into a drone at a festival. its face, a telegram from my great grandfather. & because there’s a synchronous touch to events, the moments come to us unseparated. in this […]
We found our way by braiding constellations, using our hair to map the stars as sung by those mournful voices carried across field winds. “Canaan,” they cried. And though we could not know the way for certain, we hoped for angels for chariots for […]
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, […]
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