You said to write when the seasons change, to let the forward motion unsettle my words. Let the phrases which sunbathed across the tree outside my bedroom window crinkle between their thinning leaves, be swallowed by fragility. Study the birds that nested between its branches, write how they rush to distant summers, their […]
Read more...On shallow evenings, your lover takes to chafing dried oil off old roasting trays, scraping dirt lodged like clay between floor tiles with her pinky nail. On all fours, her joints click in the rigor of her cleansing. Your lover takes to retying sneaker laces for a proper loop, over and under and knotted, […]
Read more...An hour of silhouettes: leaves like sponged paint pressed against clean linen— branches brushed with ebony in a heavy hand, and dusted with amber streetlight— trunks like wet pastels swept sideways, soaking into sleeping sand. This hour is its own shadow, itself and its outline. A tree’s roots lengthen behind the drying oils of these […]
Read more...When the candle wax over this morning cools, I hope it fastens all as it is, now. I hope it stiffens over still countertops and stool legs, over dinner dishes stacked like a house of cards— the towel underneath already dry from soapy droplets. It caught and drank while we slept in separate beds, […]
Read more...Sidewalks crinkle from rainstorms in Jersey, ridge between suburban valleys and cave under flood-lines, like my Savta’s fingers pruned from three generations of kneading dough and scrubbing baby scalps under the drip drip of a shower head that never fully ceased its flow. This path darkens under trunk-form shadows like my Saba’s shoulders after […]
Read more...Like clouds, I build people from window sills— fill in sketchpads of their panes with Monday nights. Prints of tennis tournaments suspend from fridge magnets, notes for filo dough fray thumbtacked to a cork overhang— the recipe, a family heirloom; the cork, left behind by the home’s previous owners. Faces eclipse across channels of […]
Read more...Your form looks seasoned from the endline. Your streaks faded where winter has fouled you, squeezed and stretched your leather, tugged at your jersey while the rest of us spent halftime behind a closed garage. Benched, you inhaled and held for a season, retired by the base of the hoop. You wheeze a […]
Read more...Guns become soundless when their ringing is omnipresent, when their bullets are metronomic, when their tragedy tastes prosthetic, grieved in phrases between sips of morning coffee, lukewarm on our tongue. Their sounds were shrill with virus long before our illness forced us to listen. We think we know quarantine when bodies have been […]
Read more...I have reached the back cover of my journal, blackened three yellow legal pads, I’ve soiled dinner plates with my dreams, self-published my poem in the blank pages of The Bluest Eye. I have taken to my basement walls to chart my meditations, the branches of my imagining.
Read more...What would be my heaven? Trimmed grass, fresh with streaks. Trash cans just emptied, their bodies stretching shadows on asphalt. A swing in residue motion, slowing to stillness, its rubber seat still warm with a child’s joy. Distant voices and closer birds, hushed and hastened gossip, circles coexisting. A forgotten soccer ball, […]
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