After Jennifer S. Cheng 1: the sea captured in a glass 2: a homophone for having enough for leftovers, a synonym for abundance 3: the fish, who have already forgotten you. It’s not personal 4: where memory fails, there’s still imagining 5: you. Not as an ocean but outside 6: glass and/or acrylic
Read MoreArs Poetica with Inheritance & Refuse the neighbors’ son looksabout forty. he’s standingbeneath the oaks in their backyard, bellowing, justsay you’ll never give it to me,meaning the house in which the three of themnow
Tell her. Watch her facedrain until she’s nothing but a mangled star, dammedlight. She didn’t raise you like this. She doesn’t knowthe tenderness of being a mirror along a lake’s calm.Blue into
BurningFor Mamoni Raisom Goswami When they lifted you up to the pyre, you were all red. Lips painted, eyebrows seething, skinwrapped in the crimson of your mother’s mekhela sador. Your face crinkled
On the faculty hiring committee, I march,demanding they acknowledge meand my virtues. I tell them I am decent.I never thought about killing someoneexcept myself, even then I didn’t do it.Despite myself &
Bildungsroman: Donations So in goes the broken hose that wrappedyour ankle and swept you wet to the grass, and ingoes the cylinder of loose oolong you had held under you nose like
Clanking trams pass my windows opened to the street. In a mason jar almost full with water, I place roses, given by friends, in sun atop the kitchen table. A
Year after year, adaptation: neverunwieldy, but steady. Sometimes careless. Always there is traffic, and groceries.Those are the easy things. And then sometimesthese ruptures, or raptures. Great distancesexpand / contract with my breath
Parched When I woke up this morning I was thirsty for waterso I went into the kitchen and made a coffee. Then I reclined on the couch, warming my ovarieswith my laptop
a quarto for L.B. all alone in the dark