rsvp
for sacha
you’re a bound cloud
mist locked down skipped
across the lake, I can tell
I woosh your eye’s pallet
missing calls flatten
hunger a slow drawl
boy with
1955
Nothing is earned unless something is lost. You lost your father in a car accident, as mommy explained. You are less than a year old and don’t have language for anything, much less grief. The
When Michael left for the West, I experienced what in Portuguese is known as saudade, an intense nostalgia for a person.
sour
i wanted
in the way
that want follows
bedraggled
a half moon
of bites
it starts
like this
slowly
rara saw
FIRE FIRE
in my eyes
hard to describe
to you who
no longer
The first time I went rock climbing, I lasted 30 minutes.
On Shaving my Legs for the First Time
the offending hairs that sprout from dark skin
like unwelcome ants that toil through the night
hairs that signal virility on my father’s chin
draw taunts
an immigrant love letter
this is a love letter
to jasmine rice and soy sauce in the ethnic aisle to the crisp
melting of duck skin in my mouth you taste the
I smile now, waiting, always waiting, for you to reappear and remember me ...
My wife and I are in pretty deep with the Mac. You can tell because we call them "the Mac."
I WRITE PANIC
into the locked kitchen
cabinet, china chipped
& sticky. i write
myself into a bottle
of vodka, sloshing
in waves of bitter
padded tongue.
i write the morning
green &
I once let the person I loved prick my ribcage with a needle a thousand times so I wouldn’t forget. A collection of dots arcing messily into two black brackets.
immediately I thought, “Oh shit! They got Kanye!”
words to describe love
saw a pretty plant through a store window
picked out a different one instead
that
I am writing you now from a city we scored with nomadic walking fourteen months ago. During that trip I had been ill.
One night of nothing
When the languorous motion of bats and owls overthrows the scorching August air
making a party only takes three
One night of nothing
heavy on an empty
Dan disowned my sister and me via email a year ago
In this dappled language, like a woods painted by Neil Welliver, in and out of our attention, animals wander in the camouflage. They are highlighted by our attention: each stands in a yellow bar of
for M
i.
In the beginning there was only the girl
and the ocean. Someone was telling a story;
in the story a girl’s friend died, an accident,
so she walked into the sea, breathed
I grew up in the predominantly all-white neighborhood of Warwick, Rhode Island; I was one of only two Black kids in my elementary, junior high, and high schools. I dressed well, presented myself well, got good grades.
