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.

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

I know that I am going to die.

When I was a teenager, I got robbed a lot

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

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.

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.

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,

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

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

Emptying the bottles, a simple task, was more fulfilling and more comprehensible than emptying Dad’s box of ashes 20 years ago.

Chacka

This Whole Foods smells of rot.
A lady holds half a jackfruit like a baby,
Pushes her fingers deep into the damp decay. 

We call jackfruit chacka back home (although who’s we?
I

Vermont in the summer is a place I love.

I wanted landscapes I could sink back into. I needed mountains to wrap around, rivers to rest naked upon, fields to drown in, an old snake skin stuck to the bottom of my boot

Begin with Angels in the Outfield, a mid-nineties movie remake in which a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt prays that his local baseball team, the California Angels, will win the pennant, and literal angels

I remember when my parents first told me.

A man sits in a bar in a no-name town in a flyover state. It’s late. He’s alone. A double whiskey sits before him, sweating on a cheap cardboard coaster. The bartender knows his order by sight.

1.)   Out of the following scenarios, which is your preferred way to figure out that I’ve had an abortion?

A.   We decide to stay in and have a movie night, so we go to the grocery store to pick up

The thing to do in those days was to take a road bike from the 70s or 80s and swap the parts out. I had an old Fuji, and so did everyone else. But you should've seen the colors: burgundy frame with

1.

I worked for eighteen years as the associate director of a nonprofit organization. The director and I were an effective team, in part because of our complementary strengths. I liked to say that

The best plastic surgeons are cultured. They stand at the intersection of art and science and are not, generally, superficial.

Election Night at the Stud

On the dance floor,
               my fingertip traces his infinity tattoo

and I wish more things were uncountable,
                            although cruelty