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No one’s alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead?

Debra Hughes

Those under us are not dead. They are dancers. We are the music.

He pushed aside a photograph of a man with a knife stuck in his eye.

West Oakland was characterized by unemployment, poverty, and blight.

Say what you will, a human being has the right to their own body.

Owen’s head throbbed, his ears ached, and an anvil sat on his chest.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

How do our lives disappear even while we’re in the midst of them?

Sister Barbara folded her arms like a forbearing husband.

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

What’s the harm? Will you fight even the healing powers of love?

Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.

Bees kill wasps by gathering around and tightening in the middle.

The time a man kissed my hand when we met. Though he’s been dead for decades now, I still feel the kiss.

Fatwas condoned our arrest for the rouged contours of our lips.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

The cat was looking at me with an intelligent expression. It knew.

There was a shout, then a shot fired. I pressed the shutter again and again.

I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.

A goddess was offended; her altar required my virgin blood.

Is anybody out there? Nobody answered, and I felt archaic as prayer.

In my head at least, you thrive, you die in this mix of ghost and gone.

But too much rain can translate anything to unspeakable.

My soul is simple; it doesn’t think. Something strange paces there now.

She regarded the world calmly without the filter of her suffering.

A memory in the drip, drip, drip of the kitchen sink that won’t stop.

From a pyre on the burning ghat a corpse slowly sits up in the flames.

Salt provokes, tenderizes. Your wounds, your dinner.

I love it—watching gray light bleed out over the makeshift bed on the floor.