Who called Mirrellez C. Elliott and told her that her son had died in police custody? How many minutes did it take for the police to drive De’Sohn from where he was arrested in New Haven to the police station at One Union Avenue?

For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me, like you sort of hope there is when you're a teenager.

Mom says a white deer means blood is coming. When I sleep, the forest floor is a lake of red, no matter if the deer are white or brown. A gunshot sounds.

By the base of his steps, there was a flower pot with a sad, half-dead plant. She lifted the thing. Felt the small force of its weight against her. Stupid, she knew. But she was a container brimming over. And she needed to let something go.

At the time of my commission, I did not know all the things this man would do, which means I did not know federal troops would be ordered into the cities, that water cannons would be fired, that there would be dogs, horses, rubber bullets, tear gas, that all of this that had for decades been taking place against civilians abroad would now take place, here, against civilians at home

I am the woman who the writer could not earn enough money to see. He never finished the stories, nor the political articles. He never arrived on the train, we never stayed at the hotel. We were dating at a time when I hated the idea of old age. In other words, I was happy.

But in another language, in my father’s mouth, there is a tenderness to the tone he takes, so that the word beat overlaps with other words, some of them meaning I miss you. He says beat as if the word shares a border with laughter. As if it is just a lost synonym for love.

Lobsang kept saying that crossing fates with me would get him killed. When we first got on the road, an old woman at the foot of the mountain had been…

and the tour guide said what a shame how awful the heroin in Kensington but we would not be focusing on that today because this was an African American Iconic Hero tour and she smiled beatifically at the Black couple and the Black couple only...

It’s approaching midnight and this is not how I would have wanted it to happen: sitting by myself on my porch, drinking wine from the bag of a box and chain-smoking cigarettes...

A drowning person will not splash and wave, will not shout or call out for help. Contrary to the ways in which it is dramatically performed on television and in film, drowning is nearly always physically unexpressed, measurably silent.

Janet was ten when our town turned to poultry. Layers and broilers at first, but there was no profit in eggs and soon it was all just pluck and slaughter. She stood alongside line workers, barefoot in buckets of warm water to keep frostbite away.

I vaguely knew about Dua Lipa before I saw her in concert: pop star, Albanian, that hit single with Da Baby. Mostly I’d come to associate her with my friend Isaiah.

But for me, Earl’s short poems (sometimes, I’m willing to concede, laid over monotonous beats) are speculative and visionary. They map a modern mind, short in attention, fighting to be audible above our cyber industrial reality—its alienating information storm of iPhone notifications. They take us beyond the day’s meaning-emptied habitual speech.

Now, I daydream about blue light, fever, freak weather. Once, it rained in late August and for several miles I walked beside B, both of us sharing an eggplant-purple umbrella, untouching except for when she’d wander past the umbrella’s brim and I’d tug her back into its orbit, its purple bruise.

how easy it is to erase rusting yellows? / how easy to let blues blue into zombi? / how easy / is ease?

Do we all migrare: pass into a new condition? / Are we all natives—nativus: born in bondage— / walking toward no-border?

His beard uncombed / as starlight. His crime couldn’t sing / without a tongue

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback,…

something remains of our being / braided flesh and muscle / or we’re chilled / bags for bone.

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

Let us recognise “dad bod” as another / crystallization of sexism.

Isabella Rosselini said she loved her father’s big belly / because it reminded her of how he used to sit in bed / all day writing

The refinery amid the marshland /of my earliest memories // repeats itself on the Gulf—

It’s not the first time / someone did wrong, and you / smelled your blame

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 / on video capture at five in the afternoon

time when the turning birds silver time exploding brined like sweet lemons time wolves bark skunks slip into coops fishing line knots up roads slick proud with ice the boys I fuck all eat candy

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…