Site is a four-part series of visual poems/essays/works. Each work reproduces the Trinity Test site in New Mexico—the location of the first atomic blast the world has known—at specific moments in …

We were on the roof of Nikita’s house, drinking beers. This is in the Central Valley. The roof was black and, so, hot. It wasn’t summer yet, but almost.

Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal.

I was twenty-seven when I saw him again, at a birthday party for my sister that uncomfortably straddled the line between our broke college years and some recently adopted bourgeois values.

My father said there were no other / words like the compound words / in the Armenian language.

The Devil knew exactly where to go. There were plenty of places in the world where the sun slanted long across plaza stones and shone like diamonds in the spray of fountains.

I grow daffodils now, try to reimagine / night and pretend that doors are / simple.

Beauty also is unaccounted for. / The mist is merely what it is: water

before their war, the Aqlla served / overflowing quinoa milk / to unworthy undeserving grins

When I get to heaven I will be bruised / and I will not answer any of God’s questions.

i know you’re thinking of me: it’s just about to rain.

For once, the crickets were not faulty hinges. They carried their tune.

an exercise in mining the worst possibilities from the ridges / of the brain absent of stalagmitic reach

And yet: my work is labor the way love is labor, is liability, is constant risk assessment.

I grew up immune to the ordinary, surrounded by a past / I was expected to sit on and memorize

We leave our offerings. We prepare the meat the way / we were taught, snap the wing, relish the song of crack

Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to / know madness as a way of searching.

When my mother left for the man with a cruel son, I kept / my nails sharp for when he would draw back, swing. I left

“atmospheric river” they say, as if we are children, / as if air was water, as if all was just one phase change away

The patient registration form wants to know about me. I leaf through its fourteen stapled sheets. There are lines for writing, boxes for checking and tables for completion of a story. Printed …