Even My Kinks are Unreliable Locs tossed,gagging ona red bandanatetheringpart-strippedpartly gaspingpartly resignedmy body has learnthow to ride the wavesand still arriveright at the borderof even more need. I go on the internet.Safia still writes of Khartoum& her loved onesZukiswa and other comrades,alongside their flotillashave been abductedright on the shores of Gaza.Pants down,Nigeria, my country dancesaround […]
Rage Let’s get into it.Dad t-bones a Ford in front of your entire fifth grade classroom.The sound is less like impact and more like something splitting down the middle: an orange, a thought, a damp sweatshirt with the wrong cartoon.There’s an ancient Korean proverb I half-remember:A man is a fist with no future.(Every translation leaves […]
Anna May Wong As Optical Illusions Fig 1. When I arrived within the wintered studio,I arrived at the centre of the vacillating concrete junglethat has shaken off its bare-brambled branchesof old lineages. I arrived at a scintillating heliosphere, white heat andsunspots, where the light fell throughthe darkest shadowswith greatest intensity. Fig 2. I was told, […]
First Reconciliation Abecedarian Against my irreverent impulses, I enumerate my sins:blasphemous dinner requests, stressing my parents, switchingC to D on a science test after squinting at my smarter neighbor’s sheet.Decanting my guilt in the booth, I want Father K to know I’ve learned eleven Latin phrases and tried hard to be good. Yes, when a […]
The Strangeness of Survival Today, I am thinking of deathand everything about it. Yet, I do notwant the butterfly nibbling at the flowerverse in my room stamped to death bythe unsureness of persistence welling upin my head. My window is open and thethings outside of it and in their fullnesssay to me, son, come outside, […]
