you see the trees / you know there are trees / you speak the word of trees / in a colonial language, aloud, to yourself
something remains of our being / braided flesh and muscle / or we’re chilled / bags for bone.
a man covers his face with a rag / on video capture at five in the afternoon, / a woman cuts a round into a saguaro / on video capture at five in the afternoon, / a girl twists her ankle on a rock / …
The agent does not call an ambulance. / The agent does not wake the sleeping mother. // The agent does not file a report. The agent’s code reads: / No report is required unless a domestic threat is …
With the swivel of a controller / an agent in a room of laced / concrete blocks is haunted / by bovine hitting their bulk // against steel bollards.
Lately I fear someone’s combing my brain / when all kinds of thoughts stretch in one direction.
It's hard to talk about dance and not talk about music. By applying poetry to dance, I create a score that’s particular to my body. I am skeptical of universality; I believe that our lives are …
There is always a mystery in literature; not every question can, or should, be answered for the reader. It takes away the power, pulls the punch, to have such a personal experience (as reading) …
It’s true: humans have a desire not just to tame nature, but to be its master, to live where and how we want and to not apologize for it. The second half of this equation, then, is villainizing …
Sentences are painful to make, and we now live in a culture in which the words are made into minefields after they’re spoken or typed. I feel a lot more freedom with images, which convey their …
What is it to call an animal or a plant a pest, anyway? To say it does not belong wherever it might find itself? We worry so much about words like endemic and exotic, forgetting that these beings …
When I was young, I carved my name into a two-pronged tree in our backyard that looked like a giant slingshot. It was my tree. I used to rest in its crook and look out over the lawn. I didn’t …
To make metal is to take the earth apart. The process of taking and refining the materials needed for the manufacturing of electronics, including life-saving ones, often irrevocably disturbs and …
My first curiosity with the color purple was in church. The formidably wiry Lutheran pastor, Pastor O___, with his black bowlcut and his square jaw and set-upon shoulders, bemoaned John 19:5: “So …
That's what I usually try to do with my books. I have a horrible or wild thing happen then have the characters scrambling to hold their lives together because I feel that's how most people are …
There is a man in India who is every morning attacked by crows. I heard this on the radio not long ago. This man, he once rescued a crow that had become disoriented in his garden. And since then when …
The man has a gun. He walks into a bank with the gun. He sees himself from the outside, enacting a scene from a movie. He shows the gun to the security guard, who sits down, and he shows the gun to …
She’s there on one of those red-herring March afternoons that make you think spring’s arrived, when everyone pours outdoors gasping, like they’re emerging from underwater. Her parents’ house …
Brigitte watches her mother swat at a mosquito sending ashes from her cigarette into her coarse gray hair. She’s smoked it past the filter, an orange nub in her fingers the size of a peanut. …
My mother WhatsApps me and I am traumatized to ever answer anyone concretely. At 99 Favor Taste, over bubbling stock, over boiling shrimp, my friend says: This Is Not Even Your Country/ This Is Not …