A Poetry of Absence
The men who waltz into my chest smile as my father would before he walked out one morning and crashed into a swollen thigh. What we truly know—dying is somewhere between ejaculation and a sigh. If he ever returned, we’d fill the empty china still on the dinner table with …
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Half Sonnets/Full Portraits #4
today the dream-eaters are happy creatures: have eaten many winning lottery tickets. left the falling teeth to do their falling. and. inhaled many I wish I would haves. i too wish to be content in the exact situation that i find myself in. in whatever / every moment. like when …
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Becoming the Man My Father Never Intended
+++++++++++++++—after Naked Man with Knife, by Jackson Pollock Fathers always kill their sons, chop them into flailing +++++++++++++++++flesh, grave lives survived in pieces. Sons always resurrect their fathers, the angles of those bodies +++++++++++++++++cutting into each other. The sky is always red. The blade is always bright. +++++++++++++++++My father is …
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body
Winner of the 2022 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival because the memories are buried Like bones in the yard. & only We know where to find them. That’s the trouble with God I think. all trust and no pay out. A truly …
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Artifacts That Might Be Maps
It matters, yes, who’s at the wheel, where you’re headed, tires humming a low rumble on the road, hills rocking like the sides of a great wooden cradle—let’s say it’s your dad up front, his Old Spice aftershave and cup of black coffee braiding with the summer winds that blow, …
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There Is a Border Inside My Autumnal Mind
Many times, when I meet white intellectuals online or in person, They want to speak Spanish to me or take a shot of tequila. No, I’m not ashamed of Spanish, no soy menso, however, I wouldn’t say I grew up speaking Spanish first to strangers. Assimilation? Perhaps. But as a …
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Unreadable
Sometimes I misremember and I am the one looking out the clinic window when the SUV rips through a red light and hits the drunk just as he sprints into the street, flinging him up and over like he is made only of his soaked clothing. But the truth is, …
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On The Fact That A Heart Is The Size Of A Fist
My mother is a hand. Take that how you will. // I don’t know how to describe my father other than to say I don’t deserve him. // Growing up, I was my mother’s hand as a fist. // I was a single finger pointing at everyone else while three …
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Grayout of Ada Lovelace’s New York Times Obituary by Claire Cain Miller
. “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.” . …
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How Mothers Begin Lineages
. For my mother & grandmother After the prayer, a thousand rivers erupt. Mothers name each river an epistemology derivation from the name of their child. When a …
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