Poetry

There shouldn’t be cops in this poem.If we can’t be abolitionist in a poem, then where?But it’s July and there are cops everywhere & yesterdaythere was a beautiful balding man on west 14th,stooping & sweating like Frank O’Hara, dead 59…

Afterwarmth Sunlight staring coolly from the windowsill. Electric hush.White pulsing disco bass skipping from the street, the soupedup radio. Escape across a wakenight. O swooping garrulous lightninglines, O ice and melt and rising tide, O lavender flakes skyscrapedagainst the sunset—what…

Dibé be’ iiná From a Diné perspective, goats and sheep are emblematic of womanhood. My great-aunt would winter with sheep deeper in the canyons, move with them, care for the flocks. When I was a girl, my grandmother herded our…

Everyone I love is flesh, the kind that shatters in a bomb blast, that breathes a virus in and crumbles, that putrefies when there’s no room at the mobile morgue. At least four thousand one day in winter, overflowing.

I baby but do not cry. At night, I wander the shores looking for my tears in the sand. My footprints, just skid marks in a desert

tumbling into our ears again. The genealogy of sugarcane

I’m here to return a car I never rented. The clerk doesn’t ask questions his face already shaped by other people’s lies.

to measure the dark, to measure the lemon,the frost, crackthe swivel in the cart at rest, in the darkmarooned leaves mulch beneath snowso no now owna wood slab divorced from a treedisplays bare insidesforthright as an organwith no coveringbald without…

I am learning that one major function of a child’s life is forward movement. How lucky, to get to ride the coattails of unhindered propulsion.

All Night I Dreamed Growing up my motherhad an abortion rights stickeron the front door of our suburbanraised ranch. Red shingles and blackshutters. Inside me my rightswere a tight fist. I would not openmy fingers no matter how hardboys and…

In Good HealthThe stripe across my neck makes me afraid of my body. I sip Tylenol,check the pulse in my temple the color of my tongue. You are unmoved by the litany of afflicting ailments. I name the long, many-lettered…

I moved to New York for an ideaanimated by imagery:red and yellow leaves, snow, and lots of walking.Blue mittens and bloated coatsresembling pastry. And then six months later:bare shoulders, grass roaring with bugs.On my last Sunday in California, I stood…