O aurora I see centers everywhere / & crescents too, multiplying bubbles / within which every sense / fractures concave & convex
Eyes closed, / they sang mournful songs about sons / who forget to come home, while my / twelve-year-old heart worried that neither / the rain, nor my childhood would ever end.
tell me again about the flood / the water stoppering the air & how our people / learnt to cross it by drowning / afterwards we rebuilt our cities underwater / lest we dared to escape ourselves
before brunch bottomless hipsters march on / MLK would say these chicken tenders taste like / freedom rings
The repercussions of war the multiplying of god’s face / in a strobe-like assault of diffidence and death / is in the lower right-hand corner / of the primarily yellow painting // of war / In the …
There’s one hundred and three year-old Mazal, known for the decades she gave to cleaning bodies before burial. Preparing the dead for death. Did they ever come to you, I ask. No, she guffaws, …
Sometimes being best can be the worst. The prized antlers the wapiti so lovingly drapes with velvet and nourishes with aspen shoots can turn their caretakers into rumpus room decor, even though …
take a page out of that / book, temporal without / a hitch of loathsomeness.
Back home is wider than my legs lost the beat when viper sting / hid your keys ‘tween his fingers and though he snorin’ I ain’t / lightfeet ‘nough to get ‘em you gon’ have to chain lang …
Someday I’ll stand speechless / on a grand, forgotten tree of life. // The ornate order of existence / will be my partner, and my partner / will be my shadow // My shadow will be preaching, will be …
standing shoulder to shoulder / staring at a painting of a massacre / from which the sufferers [had] been replaced / to center the camouflage of negative space / that binds suffering to celestiality
a perhaps Hand (which comes // out of nowhere), arranging / her young face, // a window into which people look / (but don’t see— // arranging changing placing // a paper in her hand, / a strange …
Arriving back in Los Angeles when the orange trees were in flowery bloom, their fragrance nearly knocked me over, flooding me with childhood memories. The poet Mahmoud Darwish said that, “cities …
What was it that slid through the field of my hand? / A mountain. I will say it was a mountain, although / it is no longer here for any other to see. It is elsewhere / and doubtless sitting like a …
We’re filming on the verandah of the Golden Age Movie Ranch in Los Angeles County. 3 AM is my sister. She’s the third attempt in the Audrey-Marilyn series. They call me 7 MH, the seventh in the …
Rachel felt small and held in the green bowl of the clearing beneath the boundless bright sky. She felt a tug in her middle, some big, sweet sadness, and knew she would always feel this way now, no …
We need to elevate queer stories, but when do we even unconsciously designate what gets to be a queer story? The more we resist accepting stories of queer characters who act less morally or ethically …
DeLillo’s signature postmodern discomfort is a bad fit for a book that claims to offer “mysterious resonance” with our current, tumultuous moment. In a time when we lack human warmth and …
In Marie-Helene Bertino’s new novel, Parakeet, an unnamed bride stands before a traditional threshold—marriage to a man—but the plunge she ends up taking is far more subversive. Following the …
Yours, Jean initially presents the reader with a seemingly placid world populated by average people who find their values tested by unexpected circumstances and look for ways to solve their problems …