They say everyone / wants to be an artist. Not me. / I want to be debonair.

I have made of myself a rabbit. / I can no longer speak. Language / is only the click click click of my heart / ticking faster now.

My peeling lips / are a sign; how much skin must a person lose through / the years in order to say that this / is a more complete version than those that precede it?

A chirp, natural / or mechanical: / not clear.

I listen to the moon but it doesn’t say much about my life.

My feet were wading earth and / rotted branches. Limbs the size of a human thigh / and twigs that could fit a small child / hand.

You can take a slap, starfish red, red as his boot treads / clogged with Virginia clay.

Let us say I slept as a snake, / camouflaged / a black stone among black stones.

There's you and your lover and there's also his idea / of who you are in this moment, and your idea of who / he should be, both of these like both of you but better— / poreless skin, flushed lips, …

stingray, embrace me. breathe on, stingray. / your burning, your firing draws streaks / across my chest, ah, how it creaks.

When I need my mother most I climb inside my mouth turn left at my incisor teeth turn right at the ghosts of both my grandfathers and find her dancing under the …

Was that season artery or vein? when the days stretched like Broadway, & the nights undid our shirts – the temperature so slight you could raise your arms in flight & feel …

On the day I was born, the air was a supple stew—heavy with overripe fruit and armpits, ocean salt, and slow-roasted goat meat. Of course, I don’t remember that day, but I was born in the …

At Night, By Myself                         —for Xiaobo life plays its bleak tunes tedious, gloomy daylight without light a rice bowl drops on the floor a ripple of sound piercing our …

The old men are unsure. Something is twisting up and up to become a stair. And what is the end for? Who would stop here and dream such accumulations? Once there was a fire. It was sinew and bone. It …

I see the moon—flickering, broken leaning against the sky—and am afraid.

Touch them, the tesserae, the shards of floating glass, which skim the rain-full gutter. Not dead: us/them—mere stutters, gluttons for new skin. Life, peel back your veil. Now, see? See …

Her dough-tipped fingers sparrow another pale moon into fullness as a giant beast clouds the thicket of bamboo upon its back with steam. Enough heat can turn a lake into air, the sea …

Drunk Bitch dreams of a luminous stream / & pisses herself. Drunk Bitch drops her drink in the lap / of a slightly less drunk body & is sure she's found love / in his smiling shrug

this once-heretical root, domesticated / for latkes. My calendar's terribly reduced.