I searched the near thousand emails April sent to me throughout the duration of our friendship for a glossary of sorts, for a history of her relationship with specific words that appear in “After Vermont, My Hipster Hunter’s Cap,” sensing …
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Dear A,
Something aches in varying textures of porousness, so I know the process of grief is like time itself. I read your poem “Code,” and something is both lost and found; after you passed into waters I could not …
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from We Will Take Any Mother
I.
time is a fold in my body along the edge of blue shale in my terraced Ohio
my mother and I are suspended two hundred twelve feet above ground
on a …
WINNER OF 2021 SOPOCO EMERGING WRITER FELLOWSHIP
You wanna know why I’m all fucked up? Starts with my moms, right? Our moms was forever scamming, yo. Would take a loan from the Pope and flee the Vatican next day …
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WINNER OF 2021 SOPOCO EMERGING WRITER FELLOWSHIP
Baptism
for my father’s church my mother dresses my sister
and me in orange burned
one hundred times over prays
in Arabic rhythmic applies a steroid cream
to my
WINNER OF 2021 SOPOCO EMERGING WRITER FELLOWSHIP
Grandmother’s eyes were glued to the screen as men in helmets and army fatigues clutched machine guns to their chests. Standing in the doorway of our three-bedroom apartment, I watched as she …
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Because names change meaning. Because we hear cries from next door like birdsong at dawn and stay silent. Stay silent on repeat. How unmoved we are when possessors manage their possessions. How accepting we are that there is one. It …
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From a love poem by Montale
I learned about a bug—cochineal—
A parasite that eats the red
Fruit of prickly pear
And then becomes the color carmine.
In another book I found
Rose madder: softer
Red, fugitive, from a …
The trees had taken their crowns away. The birds—those you would need two hands to hold, those you could capture between finger and thumb—had nowhere to rest, so I conveyed them into my house. In my house I had things …
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