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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2 Poems
1991 AND WE FLEW FOR DAYS I spilled juice on the plane’s seat, stuck my fingers in the armrest ashtray, had to pee at all the wrong times. We flew for a wedding of relatives I never knew: me in an off-shoulder party dress, throwing petal to path, smile-nodding to no one. My lola wanted [...]
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Shiva for Aunt Ruby
Aunt Ruby usually picks me up from Hebrew school, but today she isn’t here. It has been snowing for two days and this morning I broke the crystal sugar bowl in the kitchen, and Aunt Ruby isn’t here. I wait inside the entryway, pressed against the pale cinder block wall, while the other students file [...]
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Scribble Scholar Was Here
Notes of a Vandal Academic
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2 Poems
Gary's Bop Your bedroom door bolted, Trav took out the dope. Still in cellophane, he pestled it flour-fine with his Zippo and asked, Two or three? You were s’posed to with me. He cut two. Trav spoon-cooked it down. The bubbles white-brown. I bit the tail of my belt, and cinched my arm. Doors click [...]
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2 Poems
anam cara i have the land of green plums in my knapsack, baby names for wild heather growing in a telescopic city like bethlehem where water & fire are sister wives vestal twins & the house i arson(ed) sits with its ashtray mouthed duende here i will meet you unstaunched hypnotic our bodies paradigm(ed) to [...]
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MISI BIUTIKWEEN BOT
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Evergreen
When I was homeless, I ceased to believe in poverty. My headrest a shale of old bones, stone laceworks my boudoir, evergreen wine bottles and smatterings of newspaper my chamber walls. My mind was a trash of elements. A waste, perhaps, of DNA strands as long as a wingspan, but even vipers have it. Then—the [...]
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We Belong To Non-English
She pours the salt on the tomato slice. I am salt and tomato. I am spilling seeds. I am knife. I want to be everything that enters her mouth. “I’m pretty straight.” Slice. If the tomato were a finger, it would be bleeding my signature. Instead, it is black. I cannot eat it. I am [...]
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2 Poems
This Land Every night the jackals come to the prickly undergrowth beneath this porch, pulled open from Mount Carmel like a drawer with an unmatched sock. Their cry is mournful, hopeless, a wolf howl more like weeping. I lean across the rail to see them, but they are not for seeing. Only a gleaming eye, [...]
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