Head full of fishes. Someone says complicate the blue. I do. I do. I do.

Tonight, I am all joint and animal dark. My heel blots out the moon, / vanishes the small nod of light. And yes, / I prayed today, verging into my bismillah before settling / on the broken.

I wonder when you push at mirrors, if they slip off in your hands. I would / like to hold you, who you were at sixteen with the you I was when I was / sixteen.

At sixteen, life is supposed to be safe. Things are supposed to be beginning. We are supposed to be weaning from the care and guidance of people who have raised us. We are supposed to be on the brink …

Not fossil not decay unfurls / A shining ladder and makes / Rescue all. In movies / Lets loose, tears off

A neighbor assures me not to worry when the dog eats / rabbit flesh flattened on the street. Uncooked bones / are not sharp enough to hurt, turn an animal inside out.

It was night / Death slept naked / on God’s corpse

Like those jellyfish that swell with future oxygen, / I live into my gender, balloon constantly rising

Triple check the joist hooked / from your garage ceiling / is rated for at least 97 pounds.

I still very much care about that idea of measurable quality; the idea that a consensus can exist between serious readers about what is great and what is merely good.

...attending, as Hoagland did, to how white male hegemony produces and reproduces itself constitutes a valuable step, I think, in naming and deconstructing that hegemony, in refusing to accept it as …

I know happiness is chemical. & that I exist. As: an intense state of longing / punctuated by quick sparks of contentment. As: a body not allowed to pursue / its own pleasure. So, it becomes …

swore I’d be a casual bride. The dress code nonexistent (I shant have lied), beer in cans. I wanted, only, a single gerbera daisy placed in each glass bottle. Red. Just that. I only browsed the …

I am forever concerned / for the quality of the breast milk / I’ll never make.

When it comes to decapitations I just have to say one thing: / it’s tough to learn to perfect a smile for the executioner. / The executioner’s nobility, like a beauty pageant, has been / forged …

Up jump grab who got mail / Down calm breathe who got mail / Write write write who got mail

The eyes, rivers and grass— / To each one’s inclination: / The dying off, the dirt. / House, that bears the imprint of a door, you, / as a wrapped packet in a word chest, the dear sweet boy, / …

Every year, outraged people stage protests and write think pieces about Chinese people eating dog, like the classmates who asked me whether I ate dog, assumed I ate dog, mocked me for eating dog.

There are places and then there are states of mind. We recommend the latter. In the proper state of mind, borders are soft as cotton candy—you can lick your way right through them.

Today Baha is not dead; she is six-years-old, / forcing marshmallows into my mouth.