When we worked together at his father’s diner, Tom drove an old minivan; green body with red doors. He would crank the window down and idle outside my front door. He wore a blue bandana rolled up and

None of us have The Touch,

Though we have felt The Touch

*

We are all (all of us

Wearing leopard-print dusters Just once,

I was thirty hands tall (like one whole horse

Standing on

I’m standing on top of Drew Barrymore’s star and the song’s issuing from a hot-purple Sony boom box someone set up a few feet away.

                             After Qu Yuan

In my country, our insults give benefit of doubt. Nǐ yǒu bìng— 
You are sick—                                              as if there’s an

If you cut my leg and peel away the muscle, there’s a family living inside

oh longed-for, awaited beloved. she says my name
        wrong and makes me come hard. i catalog
lovers like this, coins in kitchen water. six years on,
         type thirsty into google

On that spirited Emmy night,
when the camera cut to you
and you radiating in red satin
said to the world
“It’s an honor just to be Asian”
I lost my breath.
Time stopped,
blindsided by this

with the flies, small handfuls of sunlight, sensation only one degree
removed from excess.

What to press a heart to, what color pulled up from the earth.

I’m looking for my time machine.

          (Dol Hareubang, Jeju Island, South Korea)

And there you sit, your basalt belly swollen heavy,
a gentle smile playing at your stone lips. To say I
sought you out would be a bald-faced

I wasn’t attracted to him at all but I was single and alone on New Year’s so I listened to him go on and on about birdwatching.

Petty Theft

It started as baseball cards and candy bars.
Money from my father's wallet. Protein bars on a health kick.
Eventually my friends and I walked into a grocery store,
loaded up on

Step one: Hear the fly.

One guy told me I didn’t look like my online photos while we sat al fresco in a bougie hotel in Venice. He smelled of vinegar. I ordered two crab sandwiches. I ate one and got the other to go.

When I return home, Samuelson is still in the living room with his friend Jake. I hear them talking as I enter our apartment through the back door. They don’t know I’m home yet, as I had stepped out

“Hey, are you up?”

I steer the moon over my right shoulder, vertebrae
lodged above coyote ridge, winding plains road
I drive all the night’s hungers down. White light
clasping the devil’s backbone. Today snow

"Bekya." This is my call. It echoes through the streets.

love does not begin and end the way we think it does. love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up
      -James Baldwin

when i say
I love my family
what i mean
is i worship
the

Lightning struck my grandparents’ house five times in as many years.

My brain’s a sponge: once
I slept with a playing card beneath
my pillow to stain my thoughts
bright red. Let’s not dwell too long
on the times I snuck juice and vodka
and postured for the

My 11-year-old son thinks Imagine Dragons is the greatest band in the world. Maybe ever. I learn about his new passion in the most disturbing way.

It started thundering a bit from a dark empty sky as he, in Chicago, began messaging her, who was maybe 3000 miles away or some shit like that.

to survive
tenacious teeth held their nerve

It’s funny: I don’t recall ever hearing music around you, not in the condo and certainly not in the trailer.

I didn’t have my brother Patrick’s phone number until after my parents had been in a car accident.

1. And what does it mean to witness yourself, on television, dying?

            a. I no longer watch the news.
            b. I’ve exhausted every mirror in my home searching for my

Will’s buddy Kyle kept driving past the venue, under the interstate, down a side street where the girl knew she’d never be able to find her way back alone.

I move the VHS tape with me to every new apartment, packed away in a cardboard box full of my old things.

The bartender gives relationship advice in the alley behind the bar every Thursday night while the piano player does her thing on the baby grand.