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I. The parsley girl is trickier than you think. Wouldn’t you be, if your own mother sold you to a witch for a bundle of parsley? Winter had come and she was craving anything green, would have eaten grass if a blade had been poking through the snow. The witch did not particularly want […]
Her oud walks ahead of her—soft siren song beneath her hijab— and I follow, like boys do when they’ve been taught not to live but to survive. We are cartographers of silence, our feet naming roads that never belonged to us. The streetlamps do not speak. They stare, as if they know how many […]
Floating fluff is fairy dust, pollen on the subway. A green caterpillar climbs my sleeve, so I place it on the windowsill. It crawls up its surface. Light flashes onto us as we speed past a park. Then darkness. Caterpillar climbs but these windows don’t open. It forms a chrysalis on the edge. Glows […]
I am beating your swords into ploughshares I am un sowing every dragon’s tooth I am floating cedars back up the Euphrates I am putting the Bull of Heaven to pasture I am unwinding the noose of borders I am walking you down from the gallows I am holding your hand I am holding […]
i was smaller than a candle. i had no bold fire to scare away the little man whose mouth was made of shadow, whose old body lived behind my bedroom wall.my duende made sure i was clean. like an obsessed mother, he used to reach out of the wall & cut my toenails. watch […]
first fell like invocation—a drone wing wracked, calor-sick, shitting sparks as it swivelled through cloud rot through ozone’s bruised femur a languid death ballet above the burial crags condors tarrying—not vultures no, these were feathered parsons with crimson dipped beaks sermons engraved in voracity ojos polished by haboob they unfastened the machine’s costae gulped […]
Voices slam against a wall “boys!” …and again “windows!”…and again “running!” Voices dance to fire dimmed, till they grow faint, till they dare not speak. Mirror mirror on the wall why are these tongues running still? We are taken by things. Once, they walk, they knock, they drown in a puddle. Voices […]
It is cold, and I am a small animal compared to the heavy sky. Food to heat my blood is not plentiful. My friends are lean and sleepy. There is so much I am afraid of: that a stumble could lay a child frozen; that this blankness will never erupt into green. Please […]
Dear Saturn, I fashion my body into a human telescope and point it at the midnight sky: my wrists rotate this way, that, while my fingers bend— feet flexed, torso twisted like a long rope of licorice. With these simple movements, […]
When she kissed those man-killing hands, my flesh rust on her lips, and Brutus absolved—I said Well then, I was entitled to the metal in the turning earthcore, the tissue in an animal body, the plutonium that kills you. I watched senators […]
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