Eviction
for Wislawa
As if I created this
pyramid of obey and exist.
Between the breathturn stares
of others, also exiled, and those
who called me all but my name,
I nearly forgot that I could,
unlike Lot’s
Genre: Poetry
All the waves arrive bereft of their refugees,
the trees abolish even their ruins,
amassed in the chamber of zeroes.
There is nothing there to be filled:
you could grow learned in noughts,
study the accumulation of chalk.
That too
Sampler
My feminism expresses itself in an intense
interest in what women do.
—Louise Bourgeois
Battlement stitch. And yet this same needle also made the Algerian Eye Stitch, the Peking Knot, and the Spanish knotted feather stitch, made …
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_____
1. Ah kong “Grandfather” in Teochew or Hokkien.
2. Lyrics of a song my grandfather used to sing while he ate bananas, circa approx. 2000–5.
…
Read MoreHEAR THE AUTHOR READ HIS POEM
In Minneapolis, I recently attended an exhibit
which mourned American soldiers lost in Iraq.
One walk through was enough for me. The artist,
who wrote each dead individual’s name in cursive
on a …
An actual gun isn’t part of a man’s
covert junk the last time I checked,
around 2006 in Galveston, Texas.
I was in search of a Glen Campbell
look-alike, with a belt buckle so big
you could serve hors-d’oeuvres on …
Que Significa
I thought it’ d be cooler, here,
in late June, but all night I’m kicking off the sheets
and pulling them back over my body in the stillness
of my room, until I remember, suddenly,
those …
Poetry
Now vs. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d; Assemble the Mockingbird; Disagreeable Aspects of Hyphenation; T. and I Compare the Dreamscape; & from Tonight, a Woman
Now vs. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
Tonight, my mother leaves a voicemail asking I work back-of-house when I can. I haven’t had a parent call afraid for my safety since 9/11.
Close to where …
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Poetry
Hans Christian Andersen Feared Being Buried Alive; My Dulcimer Teacher Joellen Works as a Psychotherapist; & The Copper Pillowcase
Hans Christian Andersen
Feared Being Buried Alive
I, too, Hans Christian,
once left a warning note. Your bedside
table’s scribble read, I only appear
to be dead—an effort to ward off
the would-be pallbearers
who ’d drop …
