Poetry

after Will Harris the woman behind the bar wears a miniature sword as a hairpin. I order drinks and compliment her on it; ‘I like your hairpin’ I tell her, ‘I like that it’s a sword’ (hairpin as shiv; gothic, romantic, gallant, merky) she compliments my coat It has a logo with a monkey on […]

I started in the northern woods,  a child ankle-deep in a winding creek. Sunlight.  My brothers hid in the trees with their guns.  Uphill, my mother was a window  in a high tower, and being a ghost  of a girl, I drifted through her each night.  This is the story I have told for years—  […]

tanja, i’m afraid i’m done writing now. i’ve tried so willingly to live. put good stones in my pockets. learned to name nuthatch, flicker, feathergrass, two types of daisy, thistle too. i know what grows to hurt you. that weeping doesn’t get the goods. destruction does. i was little when i learned, having rattled my […]

my young tongue lacked the language of burning. A lack of language burns: I haven’t learned how to ask my father about dreams, whether it, too, is a kind of burn, a smoke

What halcyon memory comes to a man in genuflection, 
asked to mutter prayers in languages his tongue  
will falter in?

The stool in the backyard is waiting
for your buttocks. The sun here longs
for your melanin, do you feel it?

One day I will love you
with something that isn’t pretending
to be something else. Salome, Salome, & all that
loneliness. I’m sorry—

I’m not tryna hear what you think about this statue.

Don’t talk to me unless you saw that corner store
go from the Indians to Hamadi’s Uncle to a Starbucks.
Where you stay? Where your grandma stay?