16/6 for the separation allowance— 3/3 for the personalization of the headstone. The star came free, courtesy of the Pale and Pound’s Stepney, East. Your blood ran from the Tsar’s army to fight the Kaiser’s, your April Fool’s death added rimshot to the war’s punch line. Sharp-faced, soft-mouthed Rosenberg in your pink ties, you painted […]
you love to say these things make you angry. anger is free. shake any body and it falls out of their ears in ash and sharp stones. you feel i haven’t stumbled onto more anger than i can grip in two fists, in the bridge between them, across their straining forearms trapped against […]
unpeel me from my skin & let us wash it in the sea; the salt will scour sediment from my capillaries. glistening & exposed, I will pull down the sickle of the moon & scrape my tendons clean. if we touch, you will find me like the segments of an orange: membranous & soft […]
i’ve never seen the deep sleep of monarch butterflies but I can imagine the taste of their relief in the eucalyptus grove the slow nectar of thawing winter, a rare ice wine steeped with pine needles instead of champagne at the end of passport control the pollen is a confetti of stars only ancestors […]
I. My name is too hard for you to pronounce so I changed it. My hair is too wild so I tamed it. My clothes are too strange so I wear yours. My skin is too dark so I lightened it. My tongue is wrong so I cut it out. […]
Girl, you best stop setting yourself on fire, you may be the phoenix, but these bones aren’t kindling to keep others warm— your spine isn’t a bridge you need to burn, and you aren’t a consequence, Empress: remember who you are. Woman, you a hundred rivers, each one gathering itself carefully, unhurried, unhampered, considerate […]
Once upon the august moon, we lived and loved Earth. We’re lucky, you say, as you trace Cassiopeia for the last time with a sigh curled around your lips. You already miss this. We tasted her intestines and found them too bitter, overflowing with loss. Leaving is the thing that makes sense when […]
behind the false wall lies all the burned books— banned and abandoned they shimmer, glittering in their illicitness ghost words that send shivers down unknowing shoppers’ spines when these patrons traverse too close to the self-help section covered in goosebumps hairs standing straight on their arms these readers don’t realize that they’ve brushed up against […]
My girlfriend became a hungry ghost on the 4th of August, twig-necked with skin as wet as gasoline, needlepoint mouth unable to keep down anything. We met on a language exchange app, me the English teacher who’d swooped into Hongdae like a sudden wind, her the ulzzang who dreamed of opening a BBQ restaurant […]