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 MoreI picture perfectthe moon’sabrasions,orange over Malibuthat night. Ocean blue and crestingin Dad’s blurry footagebehind his father,face paintedlentigo. This was yearsbefore his fall, beforehe only spoke in no’sand wa’s. His skullintact and helmet-free,his
“But though I tried so hard, my little darlin’, I couldn’t keep the night from coming in.” – Joanna Newsom crushed into powder I might be poison or potion I don’t know
LITANY WITH CHERRY BLOSSOMS Seppuku summer, and you cut my hair so shortI pretend I am the boymy parents want me to bethough I wish I could be nobodyas you sweep the
Landscape Standing on the Circle K bat bridge, I’m lonelyin that selfish way. My car, parked in the lot,smokes from the hood when I push forty-fiveand my phone is busted. I have
Homecoming On shattering glass water slips
Ars 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
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
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 &