I have found you where I shouldn’t—in the wrong bodies, at the wrong time, and once on a subway platform with my feet stuck to a pool of dried soda taking gum from a near-stranger’s mouth. That night you were spearmint and the 6 train. I...
The stillness you prize. Won’t prize you back. Two beefsteaks. Ripening on a windowsill. A purple tray. Piled with coal. From the field. Of solemn brothers calling. Your name in unison you learn. Men are irrelevant but. Persistent symmetries are...
In January 2005, three-year-old Ronnie Paris III slipped into a coma when he fell asleep on a neighbor’s couch while his parents, Ronnie Paris Jr. and Nysheerah Paris, studied Bible verses with friends from church. The thin and unconscious...
At the spot where the girl lay, I see the refineries. Their stencils are blurred on the horizon, making their machinery less intricate, & therefore, holy.
Walking into the smell of old wounds, something about my grandmother’s bedroom always kept me from there—the perfume once animal golden now rancid & dark as whiskey. Lace- medallioned, doilies marking time turned to loss