Poetry

I hear the wind. I have been thinking about hearing it. It answers more questions than it raises. It’s been so long that the spaces seem too big. If you move slowly each toad, tiny or fat, will leap out …

Drinking made me closerto my ancestors, I told myselfalone on the couch while my family slept down the hall Like looking into the housesof strangers at night—the peopleare familiar, a little bitgolden, gilded, framed in time They would welcome me …

I’m eating chocolates I carried across the waterFrom the shop in the alley to my American bungalowIn a little golden box One is full of bourbon cream, my paramourIt tastes of my grandmother’s living room, of ice cubes rattlingShould I …

Harvest begins at night, when the grape berries are damp with desert-moon cool. The season when I turn to drape my leg over his, and he has already gone into the vineyard. He drives a harvester, eats through each hilly …

The photograph is the kind usually discarded because the child you wanted to save forever looked away just then. What is left when the river rises: mud-exposed roots, plastic bags stuck in branches, drowned critter holes along the bank. Because …

This bruised shadow                                         of a promise. I made it.           It was meant           for her. The …

Oh cotton star in the old-timey jugI’m drinking dandelion-ade by the electric keyboardDrink deepThe nation is so far awayElectrifyinglyBut hereThe air is tricked with gemstones illuminatedWhose entire picture turns into a whirling birdWhose tiniest drawings make me cryI am not …

Fang Song is a quietPlace in the brain.There is one sign swinging there.It says ‘What?’ on it.Behind this is sky, andIs something else—A spout of waterThat sparkles in the air.Have you ever been there?Yes I found dogs.Did their fur smell …

They called youto the officefor violationsyou did not imaginethe troubleyour body ordress code, orhow short your shortscould be orwere allowed ornot allowedthe sudden troubleof your legsthe body asseparatefrom your dreamingmind and howyou were warnedand stuck in those clothesall day attendingthe …

We were outcasts living in America’s raised fist. The cancer crouched in his lungs, waitingfor the surgeon’s scalpel. My love dying upstairs as the tide spat bricks. King was already dead. Kennedy next. I made the headstone myself, bludgeoned the …

City planners love thoroughfares, bridges,dream of controlled streams, ordered footfalls;humans moving from point to point unhindered.Traders—the street kind—see human traffic as opportunity. The sides of thoroughfares, virginground for setting up stalls; traps to harvestthe shift of eyes, walls of goods …

One day my daughter will remember,as I did when she was born, a long-buried songthat emerges in snippets, swaddled in memory                                        …