I had never seen a bird flatten itself until I spied a sparrow slip through a slit in the eave of Aunt Ginger’s roof. It wore a black mask around its eyes, like people do around their fear-of-COVID faces, its feathers beautiful shades of black, gray, and green. I wonder what it would be like to gracefully flatten. I…
Finally Learn English At a Spanish kiosk with second-hand books or in the Thursday morning market, I think I’ll finally learn English, and (though it’s my native language and I teach it) it springs anew in that terrain of fresh ideas, cities and marshes I knew in dreams where waking reason becomes enmired in the lotus, yes, in that…
Tired of cherry, tired of this world, I sit facing muddy sake and black rice. Matsuo Bashō they’ll never love you my mother said sipping from the warrior’s o-choko the wine served best when heated, sipped the rice hauled up in nets, like fish, from fields for generations wine the poets tend like ritual, rice in handfuls, rolled and…
We painted little red circles for the ladybugs strewn across the windowsill legs tucked up into their dry bellies for the baby ladybugs, small specks of red kids on the playground smashed between rocks We painted round black spots for the ladybugs grandma pinched between her cracked fingers and the ladybugs she flicked from the raspberries into…
Put a fan on it, because that’s how we parch what spills here, caged metal blades carving the air, blowing loose scraps into crumb-lined corners. A recipe for disaster is what we call this place, built on fried zucchini and foot-size fish sandwiches, its brown kitchen tiles iced tea-slick. Septuagenarian, Soup Bone moves bear-hunched and bowlegged, surveying his…
SPACE (Mistakenly untethered at the of rear of the craft, she leaned away to view the earth.) The slightest turn. An unintended push and suddenly you are out of touch out …
I hold a slice of onion to the only window in this reduced world. The rainbow opposite acts as a reminder this isn’t a prison. Watch the slice turn translucent, transform into an opalescent sphere. Light pollution has been diminished by people settling into more natural rhythms. I crack the window open for the first time and steal…
Because I wasn’t in the mood for agreeable conversation. My ancestors, who summoned me here, are drunk. They are slurring their words. Someone at this table committed murder. I’m betting it’s my distant uncle, Andy, who is also a third cousin. My parents are dead but still are fighting about a trip my dad took to the red-light district…
Eggplant or plum or the shade of an index finger tightly woven with string. Restricting circulation in body parts deemed trivial is a favorite activity of young men simply hoping to stay afloat. After all, boys will be buoyant. A surplus of blood is a matter of breadth and breath. A surplus of blood also helps to spread…
Fifteen years, she’s still cleaning shit out of the kennels at minimum wage. Still saving the dogs too far gone. The biters. The aggressors. The overly anxious. Hello, Chance, she’d whisper into his dark cage after work. I’m here for you, shutting quietly her truck door. Come along now, singing the long road home. Scraps-of-life dogs. Year after…