Asian Pen Name*

Mine is Kien,
which is useful
in cases
where I need
to prove
I am who I say
I am,
like the time
a cop pulled me
over and said
Sir, do you know
why you

Dear Katie

The movie we watched the night you told me you were leaving your husband for a girl with skin rough as a butcher’s block no storm could ever smooth clean. When sharks were falling from

Being There

Describing my body is easy
because I do not know what it looks like.

From above, I imagine my face
when it experiences a thrill.

There could be more to what I’m looking

Red Teeth

Left work early to meet delivery peeps at my building. 100 weeks ago we ordered a couch. Tell ya, I've never seen two guys more pissed off to have to deliver a couch. It was like they

Outside

I keep finding myself loitering in the snow, watching strangers clink their glasses through the window's frosted glare. In my Midwest apartment I am always scrolling through photos of

How Come No One On Twitter Is Talking About This

The eye   a camera humming across the top of the earth : cavern  
gully    ravine    gorge    Far below    a tiny man jumps into a tiny

i can tell what age he lost his virginity

I’m just going to give up on these capitalist dreams and buy my self some land and a goat. 

just ugly things I don’t want to look at.

You mean to say, “hello” or “good morning,” but you know that, between us, that would be strangely inappropriate before our morning cup of coffee

Nest of resin and surf wax among blood

“You’re damned if you do and damned if you won’t”

The ferry man asked, Where is its mom? I am his mother!

I am a hoarder trying to salvage pieces.

I put on underpants and pants and socks and shirts in the same sequence every day

When he sees me seeing him, he starts to cry.

Do you think

you’ll be around for dinner tonight?

Susan’s making shepherd’s pie.

In theory, Hell in winter must be great.

a glass/ bottle containing/ the letter I/ wrote: it starts/ with the birthday/ of your first/ born

I’d’ve led him by the wrist. Still but blinding four pm/ back home blazed against the glass.

II. 
A girl and a girl are in love or planning to be.

Under haze of junior-prom fog machines,
       my cells pulsed with
              non-senescence

Your hand had never fully formed, a shadow made of lint & oil. Decades pass, divination is still predicated on how long a candle lasts, how long tea sits in a cup. Coffee? I never touch the stuff.

here were girls who sank/ a thousand leagues beneath his hips/ and never bobbed back for air. I came ashore/ in a body of my own, crooked gate/ and piano fingers

A sky
like an enormous
Friedrich Nietzsche-looking
manhole cover
tries to explain your mind
to you.