"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.

to survive
tenacious teeth held their nerve

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.

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

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

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 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

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.

Yes, my mother loved Pooh, but as far as I know her love was platonic.

Gender in the Long 19th Century ends at 4 p.m., which leaves enough time to raid the liquor store on Cowley Road. A and K and I go early, J and S join later.

The rats have eaten the grain again, and the men need a new solution. We’ve already exhausted the usual methods of dealing with rats: traps, prayers, and cats. Our town has many cats, but they simply

We’re sitting in a pit. It’s deep, well above our heads—a half-finished bunker, really, begun in the heady days when imagined snipers lurked behind every dune...

While sitting in the parking lot waiting for masked employee to bring your items out to your trunk you watch customers walk into the store. Count how many are wearing masks versus not. Watch them laughing.

I know that I am going to die.

so much of what I feel is strain and restraint, not
strength. I feel so much of my days are in want;

When I was a teenager, I got robbed a lot

During my first year of grad school, I learn how to kill rats. I work in a lab studying time perception, a cognitive function that’s not fully understood. We have to train new rats for every study.

Here We Are in Infinite Joy

“People dance to say, I am alive and in my body.
I am black alive and looking back at you.”
                         - Elizabeth Alexander, “The Trayvon

The driver laughed when you couldn’t pronounce the name of your destination. It’s a cobblestoned European town the same as every other cobblestoned European town you’ve seen so far.

after K Ming Chang

Late June, during the spider lily harvest,

            Meng Po sutures shut my skin

as soup marbles under. A broth that weathers

            me a body for the

1.

And they all lived happily ever after. 

2.

Finishing work on the Saturday and heading to the pub because that’s what we always did. Tall Paul and small Paul and (ordinary) Paul, Ian, Bel,

In the mornings, we watch the wagons come in a procession, rolling down the streets in one thin line.

I’m supposed to be on my way to Timbuktu, not stuck here, listening to a man sing about the place

Vermont in the summer is a place I love.