Poetry

The election is over, but we trudge back to the phone bank with our clipboards and scripts. We can still dial the swing states. North Carolina, Florida, Nevada: Can we count on you? Have a blesséd evening!

As in the last days, no one will...

Daddy was a slick devil, so he must have thought my sister his
succubus; a mud-bone Lilith, her lurid tresses struck shut with
igneous flicker when it happened in the black. His cinereous 

peepers, glazed over moons which pierced through...

ten mexicans are dead, left to suffocate in a trailer, discovered after the driver asked someone for a drink of water.

Crooked red fingers of stretchmark on her hips, dough Isabel kneads back into hips, magnolias in her hair, blossoming hips

For a genealogy assignment I took a blood test. I found out I am O positive. My mom is A negative, which seems very fitting. My dad is B positive. This alone would normally frighten me. Needles should freeze in hell. I told my dad I was...

When he traveled, he did so without mercy, in a body that was not a body but canvas painted with his handprints.

I imagined us a nation
because our house
was our corner of the world.

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

I’m fourteen and the smell of singed hair
circles me like the halo of a pre-Renaissance
Madonna. Loss already on my face.
A summer crush holds out his fingers