[schema geometrica] [W/RAINER MARIA RILKE] [& A TUK TUK] [& A DOG]
—I breathe indiscriminately // I kill the same // just as air does now moving through me // oxygen unstrung & grafted to blood // waste product even now in these …
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The River Stories of a Ghost
I had always thought that there were no ghosts in my family, until I saw her face looking back at me in a black and white family portrait. I could identify everyone in the frame— Grandma and all three of her younger sisters, my great-grandmother, and great-grandfather—but not the teenage …
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Origin Story
In one beginning, I gathered God into my hands, piece by piece, and made of Them a kind of life. And from this life came the sound of words until all silence ceased. One by one, their meanings mounted a procession upon the blank page of my death. This was …
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The Sound of Music Reinterpreted
The parents were not at the theater by choice. If they could have been anywhere else, they would have. Their firstborn, a son, was due to graduate Harvard the coming year. Their second, a daughter and classical pianist, was currently touring Europe. Their third daughter, whose young life resembled a …
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A Love Poem (tiburónes y gotas de lluvia)
I wanted to write a love poem and, like all good love poems, this one started with a surgeon sawing my corneas into flaps and shredding my lenses. My senses—sensitive—were overwhelmed. But maybe both love and surgeries are like that: open heart/open eyes? The reasons for my eye surgery are, …
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The Barely Missed Girls
The ash-skinned men with rifles longer than their legs Click their tongues & haggle over prospects of tender Breasts beneath their palms. Their bellies — cinched & Tucked & belted — burst with mama’s jollof. Tongues Loosened with palm wine beg for girl-wives to dine & Sleep under. A cough …
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Here
A week after my parents bury me, I follow them to the Bonneville Salt Flats. They want Gordon to see how white it is, how open and endless. They squint as the sun hits them from all angles, from above and before them, from the gaps between their feet. My …
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Moon Aching Song
Singing softly now from your altar of stone and staring from cold caverns far away yet somehow close and intimate like a sigh or breath from the one I love lying next to me, moon aching song almost full but rounded as a tear, as hip bone of woman or …
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The Good Doctor
The dim hum of an infirmary. A womb of faded pink curtains. The gurney’s vinyl slab. You are eighteen. Your gut is a swirling mass of snakes. It’s hard to breathe. A week before, you flew from Boston to Arizona on the shaky premise of attending college, but really you …
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