everything I know about a cante jondo or the deep song of my father’s country
now and then a berceuse is caught between my incisors. in my neytal vein, i serenade duquende’s sepulchral howl. it has syllables like paper swans, it has a brimstone verse that stirs a controversy worthy of the most spanish red. you strip the winters blue skin off my lips in curls of chantilly lace. every [...]
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2 Poems
Wet Trash Who wouldn’t love us when we floated in motel-pool phosphorescence, lit up like bones the flesh got soggy on, dropped off. Dad makes the last bed, doffs his fedora full of feathers he picked up off the interstate. Positively teeming. He plays pool. I play a Rich Bitch sucking candies. I leaf through [...]
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Bight
At sea there are only lovers and their lack. Cracked stones, a rill of foam on reefs—always the hum of wanting, its sail-snap. In the old songs, there is a coming home, a looking across the waves’ thin-skimmed ridges, the sea conspiring with silt clouds. How, then, on the water— on the floating bar’s dull [...]
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2 Poems
self-Portrait, after dinner no coffee yet but I’ll call you on metal stairs up from beechwood trees & I’m a pigeon in the rafters what do you mean a pigeon I mean strings whine into tall shadows wake up full, my dress unbuttons when laughs climb out & we should’ve asked for a carafe, the [...]
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Bar Folk
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On and Off the Rez
The land starts talking before we arrive at my grandmother’s house: the scritch-scratch of the jagged stones on the gravel road as it separates from the paved black. The barbed wire coils up to the gray sky. The hills undulate like grassy waves. I won’t tell the people in town what it’s like, the ones [...]
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The Myth of Inferior Voltage
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Blood Map
I couldn’t survive the Alpine mountain sloping from my name: bending alder branches into tent frames by hand, jackdaws calling me to streams where deer, arrow-pierced, finally fall. I tracked the stag whose antlers snagged my ancestry to a cul de sac. There, my cousins were sounds raccoons made scavenging trashcans. My grandmother told me [...]
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2 Poems
Tis a Mean and Dirty Little Town Nana says of Louisville, Kentucky, home of the sorghum molasses and melted butter on cornbread, the barefoot kids running down the hill: Say, who do you belong to? No one The brick reds, the blue tune Poppy played on guitar in the folding chair, The Fox, his favorite: [...]
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3 Poems
Monkey’s Hair Speaks Pluck me from your skin, Sun Wukong. Hold me to your lips. I will change for you. When they ask where? I will say China. I will forget Michigan for you, Sun Wukong. I will dig my placenta from underneath the pine tree. My mother buried it there. I will eat it [...]
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2 Poems
I Barely Know Anything about My Grandmother Outside the ravenous qualities of dust It is Missouri in the summer of 2014 a boy’s name tries to outrun the smoke Fails. Becomes it. Grandma is inside, all her walls greying at the corners across town my father sifts through dust finds his own name. [...]
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3 Poems
During the Fall Bà ngoại’s knee is made of iron, and she waits for a dead man. No army could take out her legs, though still the sparrows lunge. Wait for me, says my grandfather, but Bà ngoại does not look back. At the hospital they replace her knee with any bar that will do— [...]
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