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 [...]

         

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 [...]

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: [...]

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 [...]

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.   [...]

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— [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]