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Balladeer Quatrains This slant-ass love song is for six storeys of cement and light and how it held every portable us blanket-swaddled against scattering. This is for the width of its spaces, slope of its ramps, the promise of a place to just stop for a while in a world full of […]
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About storms, truly, what did I know?
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2. In literary Arabic, kaph is used as a prefix to mean like or as or as though / 3. If kaph is a hand that means like or as or as though, then kaph is a simile / 4. Simile is a hand touching two places at once, a hand bringing together / two far away things, making a transfer (metaphor)
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Why bother closing a door / when everyone demands it open?
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My love, I signed / what papers they put before me. / The next morning a breeze / swept in across the bar. I watched it lean / the white sails toward starboard / and lift your heavy ashes / into the air.
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I am only as lonely / as anybody else, I say / at lunch downtown, examining / my worth.
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how many men have / passed through this room, through my lips?
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What do we do? We birth the new citizens / & answer their bodies with our bodies. // We rock the new citizens to sleep. / We clothe them with skin & stamp // their passports with milk.
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Irritation Odes
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They look / for a lash that isn’t there, even them that never felt it. / It’s in their shoulders. / The lash lives in their shoulders.
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If you really must know, the main difference / between fame and infamy is the number of / mornings / you wake up alone.
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On screen, I’m peering up a faintly lit staircase and all goes grainy.
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Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.
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To speak of the shame is to speak of him / and his bed of lichen and his green / ribbon fastened around my throat.
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In my meanness I hear the mother of my mother and her mother / before her, the cold cellars and flat pillows of their hearts. The single current / of anger that ran through their voices, each daughter forever through time / believing herself a burden.
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Before I loved you, the figs were still in season. / My body was a lone fig swollen like summer. / My body was a lonely fig swollen like summer, / In every dream as bottomless as shame.
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I am in need of privacy and a new wardrobe. / Indulge me. There is nothing that style cannot fix. // Outside, a colony of bees stir with a missing monarch. / Does that make them more or less of a swarm.
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I’m tired of sheeping. / how boring, to be good. / a head gets heavy. / I can only feel this ribbon brush against my throat / so long, you know. / one day I’ll untie it, I know, let the whole thing roll off.
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once in the splendor of death, we magnify his name two of each for everyone. one for me & for me too. each one sliced long ways head to tail. the summer turn twenty-five a vow to only wear white this is not […]
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you write that “what we worship / makes us what we are,” and if this is true / then based on the poems of yours I’ve read so far / you are both a daughter and a god, / if this is true, I am a vine, invasive, here / to climb a wall. “As tendrils cling and twine / about the tree,” you write, and I try / to unwind your words into a history.
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I thought / you had grown angry with me but turns out / you were just lazy.
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it’s dark there, and wet, and time is closing in
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you wake up early / & do me no good.
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I miss space, when I’m not / reading about it
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The story thrummed its bruise open and never stopped
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The ancient sapien instinct: love is an approximation to danger.
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