poem: book review

my stomach was in disarray -- I called my editor at five in the morning and said I cannot writea review for this kind of book. where the father leavesand the daughter grows up alone. I know that kind of book already, it isa weed around my ribs. I take it out on my mother…

poem: the art of fiction no. 1

my aunt is a poet, my aunt is this old womanwho sits framed in windowsills and does not recognize the windowsill, the divide between inside/outside, she tells that shitlike it is; that is the privilege of being old, when I talklike that, people call me a bitch. but all I am doing is telling the…

poem: the sun also rises

I have this idea of maine -- the ocean is a small god, a constantalways suicide; there are pine trees like there werepine forests in my childhood, their raging phallic heads high above the fire, the drifting smote, the cow-flysilluminated from behind and turned into fairies. I have this ideaof paris, with long cafe-evenings enveloped…

poem: shifting

remember? i dreamed aboutthis kind of bliss but now in the pulled-apart strings of myheart there is onlya dull long ache and the aluminum footsteps of heart-burncoming up from my chest like a foreign man crossing overmy seven boarders his handsstill wet. remember? we were going to takethe world i woke you up in the…

writing: literary suicide note

There was no newness to anything anymore. She sat in the house and waited for people to be finished; she sat on the couches and watched the clouds pass over the fields outside the windows; the windows were perpetually dirty, smudged sometimes when the cats shoved their homesick faces against the glass and mostly smudged…

poem: your reflection in the black phone screen

i wish i was instagram aestheticmulti-block primary color. advertise around my face: kpop album, mini EPfive plastic boys and finger heartssold last yearfor five million dollars. i wish i was happy the girlhanging by her neck in a fridge future countries ironically safer, if you find the rightangle the filter she looksalmost dead maybe foreignbig…

poem: ‘now’

when i was young, i overanalysed, gave moments great epochs: that fall that summer, the size and emotionof the wind, the tree-shadow on the gable and kawaii music orold literature and cats. the boys all becomingsoulmates, over-explained but neverread. the people now are like the year: twenty-twenty, riots riots riots. she stilldoesn't know if this…

poem: party with the optimists

they were drinking fast confetti wine pinktaffeta hands they say do you consideranything sacred fuck that i sayfuck that and the dawn meltscity lights bombs my brastrap caught call me a taxi waithe says the cocaine still flush waityou were such a slut foridealism flares of art eventually i say lighting the cigerette shaky brightface…

poem: the queen’s gambit

midnight in the sixties, girl comesalive: narcotic smile between cigarette smoke and are you finished yet? oh, that is what it's supposedto feel like, don't stop. she is tight, squares, cocaine. madness in my blood like a mother,the psychosis hangingand fucking, dressed to drink,conquer, la femme fatale. the usual themes: what ami? what is family?…

poem: the view from my living room window

some people light small fires—I, am lit. someday i will be won and not waiting: it is an old refrain, told by older woman; in the still afternoon i watch three sparrows circle my childhood, the greens glowing yellow, and i think— there is something waiting out there, there is something roaring.