i captured the mood that you let go it flew up like a kite breached the atmosphere and dove into outer space like it was trying to escape all bodies— human and planetary i was floating along in my EVA suit, pressurized, detached, untethered the frayed ends of my harness intimating the moment i didn’t […]
I work to put away these daggernails of mine and carve off each stain of the hurt, each line of the black love that turned my burnished skin to furs to sweat in, to wear as uniform’d curse— I won’t lie, I wake up snarling. I want to rend what turned me so, I want […]
Someday, you will learn that life is mapped by misadventures and heartbreak, unruly as the sea, arranged and rearranged in waves, until everything is salt and sand. Someday, someone you marked as safe will call the witch out of your bones, and leave you full of burning, your mouth tasting like ash, the blessing of […]
I am angry with myself for wanting for needing for being a heliotrope who turns to the sun, believing it to be weakness, an admission of failure, as if the blood that the light creates does not thrum through my veins. I am angry with myself for being the vine, the ivy, the leaf— why […]
Each night, her mother speaks to her out of the fire: come to me, my daughter. Come into the flames. And the Cinder Girl, the one they call Dirty Ella, even the housekeeper, even the kitchen maid, steps into the fireplace. She burns brightly, hair flaring upward, skin as white as the heart of the […]
Not easy, spending my life in this one house, my nights at this window. Not easy, those first ten years saying no, turning down dances, husbands, till eventually I said yes to avoid the innuendos, and take up what might be termed my life. It’s not Peter I pine for, though he’s why I wait, […]
I hope I haven’t ruined this city for you, As if you could, As if you were bigger than these tenements, balconied and blessed with history, and you had walls dressed to the nines to fives with graffiti, and sidewalks hallowed, haunted by a few sad stories, a few fierce glories, As if you could […]
I never liked the trick with the girl and the swords. The magician would lead her to the box; she’d peek inside, as if expecting it to lead somewhere unusual, a book-filled desert or an ice cream shop only serving root beer floats, right before entering. The door would shut and I’d always think she […]