Cloning my Grandmother
When I clone my grandmother, I make sure I don’t include any of her memories. Her childhood where Japanese soldiers with swords roamed around the village built with straws, the days waiting for her never-to-return father staring at the fields and the days she wouldn’t even have time to stretch …
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Sweet Is the Truth of a Nation on Your Lips
The river stones are listening. —Yusef Komunyakaa For Nasrin Shakarami, Nika’s mother تلخ bitter is the afternoon, and minutes away from midnight when they they are the street corner where her mobile phone is silenced for good, the post-mortem, nine days and nights …
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Sonnet to Break the Crown of Invisibility (III)
||| Shears of season, bleats before slaughter eat the sky above Cavan Town. Your forearms over railing moist air in your lungs. You left the desert to whittle your mind from aorta back to cranium. To divert the narrative; a narrative burning in your guts. In this lough, stories build …
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Man Kinds
the “no-homo” men the “I just let the suds slide down my ass crack, so I don’t have to touch my asshole” men the “I won’t eat a hotdog” men the “that’s gay” men the “I’m not gay, but…” men the “you’re so brave, it must be so hard for …
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four days after the hospital—there is still blood on my glasses
against and after Amiri Baraka where are the switchblade poems long-haired crazy-eyed leather-jacket poems poems to find the man screaming communist kike …
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Sonnet to Break the Crown of Invisibility (II)
|| My body a ghost of an outline, behind empty glass, reverberates. I watch two white women in spandex stand in my lawn. A young boy flips a ball in his hands, mouths mother & then fucker, sailing the ball into my window. Two women continue to talk. I open …
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I don’t think it’s fair
Dida and the wall are in the middle of a conversation that uses a dead language without translation or root. The wall is her accomplice. She plans to bomb the roof for not letting her see the sky. The wall knows nothing about the blue that echoes across the earth, …
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Fruitful
A body that bleeds unprovoked is expected to do other things. The expectation that some bodies produce fruit. Or a different kind of production: the body like a city. The body at the center of the city, red lights ripe as seeds after the flesh falls away. At the center …
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Dead long
Stiff and cold fingers mourn The keratin rupture For a loot of half-moons On the husband’s charpai frame Crescent marks & lunulae Sit sanguine, the proud Spoils of his night’s labor And an empty glass of Turmeric milk stands on A chinioti night-stand My dowry’s rosewood organ–– The vestal white …
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Argument
One could argue that the chief contributor to the violence in your country is your silence. One could argue that the silence in your mouth means you are eating without chewing. Walking on the street late in the evening, carrying your bag of groceries, your wallet weighing down your loose …
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