SUSHI

umami fish in dead cold
sticky rice clings to
gum. take another slab– tell
yourself you are the
ocean, that you will
chew through sea-
weed.

I THINK OF GIRAFFES

In the bag the child swam and twirled and stopped long enough to meet the eyes of the camera. 

After I finished the reading, I waited a couple minutes, browsing books, until I left the bookstore - alone. All the women who’d watched me, who were so supportive, so attractive, were huddled in a group. They were friends, they were a community.

Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.”  I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity.  I

My sheets got dripped on. We didn’t finish all of it. I fell asleep with the taste of it dried around my lips. Sweet, for a little.

Toronto-based writer Sennah Yee’s first collection, How Do I Look?, is quick-witted, lucid, observant and constantly rewarding. Though her book is technically classified as poetry, her pieces feel more like vignettes to me, mini-stories and personal anecdotes that seem to be examining their feelings in real time, tackling in the process a wide range of topics such as mythological figures, the movie Mulan, The Sims, sexual awakenings, microaggressions, Grand Theft Auto 5, being Chinese-Canadian and much more.

Suggestion

new boyfriend says he’s worried. new boyfriend says i should stop saying credit cards are just free money. new boyfriend says i should stop telling strangers at the bar lyme disease

I finally tore Bluets in half @ 12:50 a.m.
I had had enough of it, of its blueness…
I had begun to loathe its preciousness, its precision
What it represents -
Its fans, the copycats

Chicken à la King

I bit. We bred a snoutless dog to lead
us to the prize. We groomed ourselves
with yearning floss. You swam
through scum in the retention pond
and called it flamenco.

Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Laura's 6th grade locker with her roll-on deodorant, in Dr. Davidson's walk—slow and tight-calved, in Mr. Robinson's guitar—Cat Steven's "Wild World" each afternoon before the bell, in Mrs. Roger's wavy, knee- length red hair—smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes. 

now the poem is a woman

On November 13, 2012, Hugo Dos Santos awoke shortly after 1 am with an urgent need to urinate. He got up from bed and took two steps out into the hallway when he saw three small creatures in

The Record
Fear
Label: Slash
Released: May 16, 1982
Length: 14 songs, 27 minutes

This is about a dead guy. But it’s 1995 and the dead guy isn’t dead yet. He’s driving. A black

reach inside the incision
up the stomach from the asshole
ribcage gristle light brown mound of heather memory

spill oddities, like miraculous whole red berries
feel for the heart with two