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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Trio
I. Playland was Poland with the o pulled out and play put in, echoing the home country but safer and more fun. Each Sunday, we begged our parents to take us there, where the two families converged like pilgrims on the western edge of Golden Gate Park, standing at the …
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Inheritance
Nadia knocks on the door for the second time and waits. She can hear shuffling footsteps, the rustling of papers, the blowing of a nose. The clients like to tidy up before Nadia arrives, make a good impression—despite this loss, I’m still holding it together!—even though she couldn’t care less …
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The Frog in the Hall
There is a frog in the hall, sitting on the banister post. He arrived in my child’s hand and now sits patiently, and because it feels rude not to acknowledge him, I make eye contact. I give a little nod to the frog in the hall as I shuffle past with …
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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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Butterfly, Fly
They walk along spiraling paths under the domed ceiling of the garden pavilion. She is four. She isn’t supposed to, but it’s hard not to. And so, she does. Touch them. A broad leaf. A wandering branch. A soft flower. So much spilling out and over. Gentle. One small finger …
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Housing
You’ve taught me to watch for things. The bees making the penstemon go swaybacked. The look of a primrose when it’s about to uncurl in the night. The white flits at the end of evening grosbeaks’ wings before they dive into the larches. Kinnikinnick and lazuli buntings, Pacific wrens and …
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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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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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What You Eat
The embarrassing thing about dying is, people talk. We list heart attack, stroke, cancer as causes of death, but we know the behaviors that lead to these things. If you’ve lived long enough, people have seen you engage in many—a cigarette after dinner, some reckless driving. In death, it all …
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