Self-Portrait in the Garden
With a soil knife, its blade speckled with deep rust. With the groundhog caught in a metal trap, too-soft big-boy tomato in its hands. The split ends I trimmed with dull scissors––I feed them to the soil, place a daffodil bulb on top. double cheerfulness, dutch master, lemon sailboat, thalia. …
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Play House
for Breonna Taylor There may come a time Where I may need To shoot a motherfucker This is not a new revelation This is a resolution I didn’t have a choice in making A verdict passed When the good Lord Put me in this skin Split me between my legs …
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Hush
At the Common Ground Country Fair, I finally get to babysit a real baby. “Push her around in the stroller for a while until she falls asleep,” says the mother, a friend of my parents who runs the spinning booth. I feel like I have been given the doll of …
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Praise Exercise
Feb 28th: Good job! In peace, an old woman whispers sweet nothings to help a flower bloom: yes my love, grow, grow, grow, slow and steady, you’re doing such a good job, I love—the train halts to a stop. We step out into dim, streetlamp sun. Mar 3rd: Good …
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Sonnet to Break the Crown of Invisibility (|)
| Here, I saved this for you, she pushes the white book with an outline of a Gerber-baby-esque face embossed in gold into my hands. Your baby book, she smiles with teeth exposed. She only smiles with teeth for family. In photos, only pursed lips, upturned. I cock my head, …
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Needle Exchange
The harsh overhead tube lights flickered, fading almost to darkness then sparkling back to life, as a bone-tired Vivek entered the inpatient ward. On paper, Vivek was merely a trainee physician in his first year of residency. What this meant in the real world, however, was that he was …
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Cloning my Grandmother
When I clone my grandmother, I make sure I don’t include any of her memories. Her childhood where Japanese soldiers with swords roamed around the village built with straws, the days waiting for her never-to-return father staring at the fields and the days she wouldn’t even have time to stretch …
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Bunk Beds
When I think of that winter, I think of the emptiness of the mattress above me and the sounds I stopped hearing from underneath it. My sister was a loud sleeper. She tossed and turned a lot, often banging against the wall against which our beds were pressed. My …
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Sonnet to Break the Crown of Invisibility (III)
||| Shears of season, bleats before slaughter eat the sky above Cavan Town. Your forearms over railing moist air in your lungs. You left the desert to whittle your mind from aorta back to cranium. To divert the narrative; a narrative burning in your guts. In this lough, stories build …
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