I am six. I am looking at your teeth. I am calculating the volume of your excavator jaw. They have stripped you, chipped the stone from your naked frame, unsheathed you from feathers or scales. Leaving this skull with holes I could put my hand through. Unshielded from the wind and the din of this […]
Even these days, dusting the piano while the icebox hums smoothly in the afternoon, you find your ghost husband sleeping on the sofa, a lanky drink of bourbon in the old brown suit he rolled out of bed in both your lifetimes ago. He touches the keys to the tune in your memory, leaves the […]
for Jaymee Goh Star anise floats in the night–sea of meat bone tea, backed by the cloud–flower shapes of lingusticum. Astragalus, codonopsis, and licorice lashed into a raft drift among goji berries swimming like vermillion carp. Angelica and polygonatum swirl petal–soft as blossoms; dioscorea bobs and forms the white sands of a riverbank. Bulbs of […]
I have known eons among celestials The way you have known a second. I have stretched from the rains of Draco To the banks of the dreaming Mekong. I was there when a son of the Shakya Flowered into bright Tathagata, Breaking the cycles of Samsara. I watched my wisest daughter journey To your young […]
Tell me what ‘legitimate’ means— how much proof do I need to convince you that blood is blood and bruises are bruises? Why is my voice a casualty of violence you won’t examine? Did I say no? Was I drunk? What was I wearing? A better question: why is my body not my body? Here […]
My neighbors are good people. My neighbors know how to find monsters in the dark. They have welcomed me to the neighborhood. John Sinclair, my neighbor, asked me what I think about witches. He asked over a glass of wine the color of a moon drowned in a creek. I drowned the wine with more […]
the banana plant her hand and the embodiment of being left behind, her hand beneath the soil, the weight of leaves and dirt. what to make it hold. what the word “held” even means. terrifying secrets buried in the yard. why must her love be the reason behind a swishing sword? you are not a […]
grandma’s the one who taught me that spells were most potent baked into pie but now she has started to forget first her keys, then her spells memories thinned like her silver hair doctors run tests as grandma says she’s not worth any fuss I’m not fussing—I’m fighting to preserve the bright spark in her […]
Only love could make me long for all the things I once feared: eternity as silence, forgetfulness, a scar over the raw wound you left behind. You taught me heaven is not a place, but the magic circle drawn around two souls, and then you broke it, invisible ink scuffed so you could let the […]