The agent does not call an ambulance. / The agent does not wake the sleeping mother. // The agent does not file a report. The agent’s code reads: / No report is required unless a domestic threat is …
With the swivel of a controller / an agent in a room of laced / concrete blocks is haunted / by bovine hitting their bulk // against steel bollards.
Lately I fear someone’s combing my brain / when all kinds of thoughts stretch in one direction.
I sing my blue sun. Sun as vast as all the coupled stars. Sun that dances the polka until the body bursts in pieces. Sun out of time. And of the dawn unblotched by drunkenness. Sun of all hopes. Sun …
When you enter a room out of need, they are all / the same: the field an antechamber, the kitchen / a narrow sky where you peel the carrots in long, / thoughtful strokes—stem to taproot—just as …
Time is elastic: / either it’s 1994, or it’s 1980, / or it was just last night, / it makes no difference: someone slips out / the back screen porch / of their parents’ home / for the last time, …
At the scene, the Angels PD urge Mr. Du to 'sir, lower your hand!' During the death, Mr. Du was asleep in the family van. The bark of the shot, the snitch of surveillance, it conceives Ali butterfly …
Keep talking back. See if I don’t slap your taste into another Taco Tuesday. / They didn’t teach you how to braid in school? They won’t let you take that / backpack of Rap Snacks in the …
A caress without purpose, a splicing of limbs, / a dust kitten on the floor, a room closed off in / fall, a scab torn off, regrown. // I lay my remains on the stove, and all my birds / hide …
My mother WhatsApps me and I am traumatized to ever answer anyone concretely. At 99 Favor Taste, over bubbling stock, over boiling shrimp, my friend says: This Is Not Even Your Country/ This Is Not …
O aurora I see centers everywhere / & crescents too, multiplying bubbles / within which every sense / fractures concave & convex
Eyes closed, / they sang mournful songs about sons / who forget to come home, while my / twelve-year-old heart worried that neither / the rain, nor my childhood would ever end.
tell me again about the flood / the water stoppering the air & how our people / learnt to cross it by drowning / afterwards we rebuilt our cities underwater / lest we dared to escape ourselves
before brunch bottomless hipsters march on / MLK would say these chicken tenders taste like / freedom rings
The repercussions of war the multiplying of god’s face / in a strobe-like assault of diffidence and death / is in the lower right-hand corner / of the primarily yellow painting // of war / In the …
There’s one hundred and three year-old Mazal, known for the decades she gave to cleaning bodies before burial. Preparing the dead for death. Did they ever come to you, I ask. No, she guffaws, …
take a page out of that / book, temporal without / a hitch of loathsomeness.
Back home is wider than my legs lost the beat when viper sting / hid your keys ‘tween his fingers and though he snorin’ I ain’t / lightfeet ‘nough to get ‘em you gon’ have to chain lang …
Someday I’ll stand speechless / on a grand, forgotten tree of life. // The ornate order of existence / will be my partner, and my partner / will be my shadow // My shadow will be preaching, will be …
standing shoulder to shoulder / staring at a painting of a massacre / from which the sufferers [had] been replaced / to center the camouflage of negative space / that binds suffering to celestiality