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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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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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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Sweet Is the Truth of a Nation on Your Lips
The river stones are listening. —Yusef Komunyakaa For Nasrin Shakarami, Nika’s mother تلخ bitter is the afternoon, and minutes away from midnight when they they are the street corner where her mobile phone is silenced for good, the post-mortem, nine days and nights …
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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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Man Kinds
the “no-homo” men the “I just let the suds slide down my ass crack, so I don’t have to touch my asshole” men the “I won’t eat a hotdog” men the “that’s gay” men the “I’m not gay, but…” men the “you’re so brave, it must be so hard for …
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four days after the hospital—there is still blood on my glasses
against and after Amiri Baraka where are the switchblade poems long-haired crazy-eyed leather-jacket poems poems to find the man screaming communist kike …
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Sonnet to Break the Crown of Invisibility (II)
|| My body a ghost of an outline, behind empty glass, reverberates. I watch two white women in spandex stand in my lawn. A young boy flips a ball in his hands, mouths mother & then fucker, sailing the ball into my window. Two women continue to talk. I open …
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I don’t think it’s fair
Dida and the wall are in the middle of a conversation that uses a dead language without translation or root. The wall is her accomplice. She plans to bomb the roof for not letting her see the sky. The wall knows nothing about the blue that echoes across the earth, …
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