Beside the gulch, beneath a willow, there was a girl who chipped her tooth into a boy’s mouth as they kissed. She never got that sliver back. My legs grew every night, keeping me awake. In summer, …
"Impure Mythos" is an anagram of "My Promethius," a poem of my father's. He died in 2024, leaving behind a vast archive of poems, stories, and hilarious, rambling emails. In my recent practice, I've …
My First EDM Concert It’s 1:20am, and I contemplate dying. Should I do some coke and call it a day? I write a poem at a rave. Sue me. Behind the men who DJ is a screen projecting the head of …
He’d drive us out into the desert and we’d hike through that dirt and brush, rocks wrapped by lichen, until he’d say, This is good. Then we’d shoot coyotes. Shoot them all day. Smoke her, …
I’ve known abandonment because I’ve known and loved the image. The image abandons, abandons by its nature, like nature abandons. If I say, the body is a stone, I have abandoned the body. If I …
After Charles Wright I can’t describe the photograph with the clarity of the photograph. That is the anxiety of the image. I can’t describe the groan in my head without imbuing it with a sense …
The people now inhabit the crowns. There is, in fact, little space up there, but no one turns off your water or comes by with the leaf blower or raises your rent out of the blue. Up …
A hair fell from her head. It fell and fell and I followed it with my gaze. It landed in one of the trays that sat on a scale. It threw the scale out of balance. The scale tilted. It …
As in some demented romantic comedy, my wife and I divided the apartment in half. She took the living room and I took the bedroom. Bivouacked and bleeding, we waited for the lawyer to finish the …
A frog jumped out of the broom closet; the wife was already screaming; and the husband burst into the kitchen, squeezed the trigger of his face. In the time it took the morning light to stream …
I don’t want to go to the mosque only women may walk around in gold and silk ustad says when he caresses my ears my Arabic teacher calls me his gazelle
Majnun loves his Layla like a man possessed his love burns hearts glasses and plates...
I write to the learned Sufi the rabbi the imam and the shaman on WhatsApp whom I now have to pay my dowry...
A strong wind breaks a tree branch by the roadside. The branch trips up an electric bike. Its food delivery box tumbles to the ground. A rental bike bumps against it, tips over. The two riders fall …
“Well if you leave out his personal life, he was a happy man.” —Lynn Brown Jr., business associate of Wallace Stevens It is, of course, old Wallace Stevens, austere as a cow in autumn, …
In what may have been our last week, we went down to the late afternoon meadow, and stood at the high blueberry bushes,
At night, my friend, awake in bed, takes yet another hard candy from the box, heedless of its taste, and after unwrapping it, throws the wrapper on the floor where it will remain for a million years. …
The woman walks away from the car. Her husband in the driver’s seat and the children in the back seat sleep, dreaming of summer storms. We watch her from our car in complete silence, pondering. …
& ignores it. Instead, the artist paints himself & his easel perched on the edge of a landscape of stone edifices & staircases that hug the earth like the rumored hanging gardens of antiquity.
There are many ways to leave and not all of them involve disappearing into yourself. Some are easy as (_____). Say it: flight. (_____), etymology archery, the passage of days, tail of a dart, a …