If you cut my leg and peel away the muscle, there’s a family living inside
After Qu Yuan
In my country, our insults give benefit of doubt. Nǐ yǒu bìng—
You are sick— as if there’s an
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.
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.
(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
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
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
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 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’s funny: I don’t recall ever hearing music around you, not in the condo and certainly not in the trailer.
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
I didn’t have my brother Patrick’s phone number until after my parents had been in a car accident.
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.
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.
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.
