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.

Officially—according to the Nassau County Medical Examiner—officially, we were both dead. When we boarded the plane in LaGuardia, we had been in caskets. What an incredible idea, our grandchildren must have thought, unearthing the deceased.

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.

Jacob opened up an entirely new door for us. After that, we often spoke to the camera directly, to our therapist, when it felt like speaking to each other was getting us nowhere. I loved how cinematic it felt, how odd it was to speak through the lens. I was reminded of a moment in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, where the narrator says: Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people, as they teach in film school, not to look at the camera?

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.

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...

Buried on the side of I-20, covered in red maples: the Pro-Life Memorial in St. Joseph, Iowa. A stretch of fenced-in earth, speared with a thousand tiny crosses for all the aborted “children” since 1973—

In Delaware Water Gap, I met a stranger I’d been looking for since Georgia. We both stayed the night in town, at a donation-based hostel in the basement of a church.

The plastic surgeon, a short, blond-gray mustachioed man comes in to tell me he’s headed to the OR and will see me in there. He taps the rail of my bed twice, a gesture I take as doctorly affection, and turns to leave the room. I call after him, “Just remember—think small—like, real small. Like, just get rid of ‘em!” Dr. Haynes reminds me that this breast reduction is not cosmetic surgery.

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.

Ilana, the Hebrew teacher at Houston's Beth Yeshurun Day School, which we called Beth Yesh, gave us actual-size apple-shaped milk chocolates that fell apart into neatly overlapping slices. One day an angry girl whose mother had given me a Pinocchio puzzle for my third birthday shouted...

When someone at school asks, “Where are you from?” what they mean is, “Are you from the wet side or the dry side?” You are from the wet side, the side more prone to damage.

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?

But we arrive to find it’s been co-opted by a cocktail bar. / The Moss wants to bounce but we’re already here.

Some call this cloud work, some call / this clever crows riding the updrafts.

The air - was Close - the Pane - slid High - / The Sill Imbued with Dust - Gave Up / A Maple Wing - of Brussels Lace - / A Tachnid or a Horse - Fly -

My mother wrote a poem on her deathbed / after five bleak months of leukemia. / Something in Arabic to the effect of, Why me?

Like any good flame / I tapered, acquiescing / to my extinction.

It begins with a host (an immigration) of spirits clobbering / intestines. Think: “Longing as attention seeking,” or “attention / people, we are starting the show.” I will pay in tennis balls, carrot cake, / kangaroos, and quotes. Here are a few goblins. Take my heavenly glow.

After death the heart sometimes keeps beating / a little. Or after it’s removed / from the body.

A headline reads: NASA warns alien life might not be fuckable. / An op-ed, hopefully.

Fresh from the ER, I drove round a parade / ground empty but for peepal trees and a row // of slumbering buses.

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

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…