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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

they can tell time by looking at the sun they can hear the buffalo running two hundred miles away even if they live in Chicago or Minneapolis or Farmington they can heal your broken leg with a wey-ya hey-ya chant if there’s no doctor at IHS because the funding for the year ran out they [...]

An inch and a half from my jaw line I first felt the pain. Like someone had pressed the back of an earring into my skin over and over. When I started to feel it on the other side, that’s when the vague worry grew into a concern. It wasn’t my concern, but I knew [...]

This is Not a Decode this is about our relational differences, it’s about the curls in my hair, the darkness of my thighs. So I’m split a thousand ways, binaries of opposition, reduce me to body parts, but the width of my cheekbones can be deceptive. I am going unsignified today  (lbr, it’s not that [...]

to begin, she blinds herself of memory & suddenly his hands are a deer born in the dark she paws him his brag of dust his slate & husk her tender gorse mist of stonewound rain married to musk all the orchards baubled with antlers, damsons, foxholes remember his girl, remember her legs cocked like [...]

West Texas Miles drip slowly, condensation gathering on glasses of sweet tea Blurring endless country sprawl, the occasional hill to career down. Speed as fast as you like, you can’t shorten a 700-mile stretch–– Humid nightfall in your dry eyelids, forcing an admission of defeat, So dark you can’t see straight, never mind the aching. [...]