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.

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.

It happened in a matter of seconds, this overlay of violence in my mind, that took us into another life, and then it was gone. Perhaps what I wanted was to have my future thrust upon me. No, I thought, just another anxious fantasy. It was just the mind’s preparation on overdrive. It all might have happened differently. The alligator had every intention of biting her. Tori’s face flashed with anger momentarily before Frank tried to pull her away.

I asked Grandpa how he got the silver medal he’s so proud of, and he said he got it for shooting a Northern Viet bastard right in the face. He said the…

One afternoon of his every-other-Saturdays, my dad took the crossbow gingerly, respectfully from its box on the top shelf of his bedroom closet and led us out onto the apartment’s second-story back porch, a cement slab overlooking the train tracks.

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...

On 9/11, with the radio transcribing the ongoing events and his white coworkers in the plant nursery going mad as though the place was burning down, all my dad could do was laugh. As far as he knew, the Omaha nursery was fine. The roof was still above their heads. The ground was unmoving. The sky still blue, and most importantly there was work to be done.

Her body and mine are the same shape. By reason, this means mine can be touched. I still can’t stomach it.

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 time after the detonation.

You once said to me—as a joke, I suppose—that all your books are “brief, collaborative, and plagiarized,” but really what is the secret to your somewhat monomaniacal rate of production, especially the last decade?

When I was 12, dad took me to the darkroom to help him develop film. He wanted to show me the enlarger, the dangerous developer liquid, and why red light won’t react with silver salt.

            Recently, I was talking to my friend, Camas, at a party when the subject of our college admittance essays came up. I haven’t done a lot of…

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?

to bury a Black body / not out of respect for life / but to prevent disease // and cut the stench / and if a cross is laid on / the mound of dirt

I dream that Hoseok is my bus driver. We hightail a heist at the British Museum, returning stolen art to their rightful owners.

If I show you an image of a bird flying, you might think freedom, or graceful, or wings. You might remember your mother pointing to the sky, naming the bird starling, heron, crow. But all of that is yours.

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

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

i open my hands & eat the bird inside the ball of light, the song of the bird of the devil burns a hole in my body & out of it a streak of feathers

i don’t want to ___________________ about this.

Jesus Christ let me get a witness / on my grave I don’t have a dollar / I barely even own my name.

When my mind plucked me / abruptly from earth and gently // laid me in abstraction, time went and saw / the world.

I was shimmying on stage, apoplectic in the harsh blue neons, when I remembered I have loved you my whole life.

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…