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people say ‘as the crow flies’ to mean the direct route between two locations, but crows zig and zag dip and soar they pause to be curious they slip between the realms of the living and the dead they fly high enough to share dried bread crusts with the very stars and low enough to […]
Karthikei (1) A month of the Tamil calendar. This month, in fact, but what is a month without a moon? (2) Karthikei Theepam, a festival of lights held in the aforementioned month. Although, in low-power mode I cannot light lamps (3) Karthikei pū, the Gloriosa lily. They’ll be in glorious flame-coloured flower marking our annual […]
We ran from the burning puppet theatre as they hunted us. I was their cook and you smashed clocks by the river— You say you don’t remember this. When the stone kingdom fell, I was alone in that brick house by the roadside a line of cobblestone lighthouses on […]
I can’t write poetry about this. I can’t. to open myself to the horror is to let the sea rush in. already, I am a thing of sand foundations, dissoluble & frantic. there is an ocean of terror crammed into a shell hidden deep inside my throat in the place where I should be screaming. […]
(I) In the Wild A passive brightness scores its initials on the thatched ceiling, as the sun plasticize our shadows on a wall frame. the smeared patches of light, whitewashed for our voice to regift colors. & sound is made flesh. & the luster worms into both language & leash, unsettling—as the raw weave of […]
Ghosts say funny things when they are family–Ocean Vuong The ferry to this island, you do not meet the crew. No snacks, no restrooms, just ten minutes of pure terror as your car is lashed to the prow and the spray from Sound plashes your windshield. You have never felt the thin of between so […]
The souls in my garden sing: At noon, when light cracks through Sea-salt to the sandy beds And again, when midnight Spreads the sky with stars in A radiance that we, Deep-water dwellers, Can only feel Under our skin, scales. They sing of what they Once loved: Princes, their […]
A custom sun graffitied with the low pink scrawl of waking burns orange with hope rising and stretching like the landlocked siren singing over sighing plains where ewupniaq, calming storms of plant calligraphy hold pollinator epistemologies in the brush of wing and scale to leaf: in cobalt aurashine light pemtaqaiet slithers around like a snake with […]
with a line from Romeo Oriogun’s poem: Cotonou mama is not dead. she sits under the plum tree beside my window. she’s a bird with prominent feathers; she’s a girl of fifteen she’s just like me—broken and beautiful her eyes are armed with letters from the past: darts of war and hunger splitting the bowel […]
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