Poetry

She couldn’t have carried knowledge their kind would soon be extinct. The sediment came when it did, sealing them in their varied positions.

What a good time we could have if we were happy to be who we are.

Yang Wan-li said, There’s enough to eat. Who needs a lot of money?

Brain an inkblot liquor stain until the heroine blinks the coma away.

Just give me a small joy, say, the size of a ketchup packet.

The toes you step on today may be attached to the ass you kiss tomorrow.

You almost never know different so you make a language of it: chitter, glissando, trill.

My days pass through me as music through a thin, stretched wire.

Oh, won’t you lie here darling whistlepigs, here, curled at my side?

Her girlish hand the color of rich vanilla floating over the flotsam.

My new car cost more than my dad’s first house; I Googled it.

Hard to know what a prisoner believes, what the guard presumes.

Another disposable medical mask drying in the June sun after all the ceremonies are done Looks for a second like a lip snarling in that flirting way you see the tattooed girls snarl

They rise in waves, while a lone hawk remains unperturbed.

There was a ladder planted dead center in a field of high, thin grass.

You are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers.

I wonder why I feel bound to the gray-dry skin of you, the barrenness of feet.

you cut through brush with the iron edge you push before you

Picture the thing you want most. True love? A new car? Let it go.

The world beyond the windows slowly tips forward into spring.

You came to me in a hanbok dream, fluttering as it flew in.

The year we left the reservation a white boy gave me a trash bag.

The canary-yellow sweater she knit while pregnant with me thawed first.

Come winter, they go to the funeral early & count the living.

My father’s paperbacks, 35 cents a pop, forgotten on the high shelves of my bookcase. My father found pleasure in hardboiled dicks, half-clad dames, and misogynist jokes.

Pummel nests from limbs and drown the furred things in their dens.

Mom could have been an acre away, or doe-still behind the next stalk.

I peel back the hours and search for the light before it scatters.

Having held down the past applying pressure to its sacrum . . .