I unzip my body like a big soft sack, looking for more things to sell— that’s how my grandmother survived the war. When I was born, she wasn’t fat, just her skin, sagging over treasures sold in hunger. A big emptiness where all had once been— words, family, an open window with its freshly starched […]
This disease is a motherfucker. It lies to us in our own voice. So, please: be careful. We may do each other as much immeasurable harm as immeasurable good when we get together—once weekly in a moon- less annex of the community health center, soon to be absorbed into the hospital conglomerate metastasizing its way […]
Even your brine, fish-stink overflowing sky’s nets to lodge behind this tongue—even then, kaṇṇa, I’m flotsam distant, half under, sure only of old air burning this throat, and the next shredding gulp for boundary. Cranes in waterlilies I know, but not whose, or where, or whether they knew you, if there was ever a you […]
The whales do not know that they are small, click-whistle hunting in cerebrospinal darkness. Deep down, pressure heavy under the fly-twitch ends of the horse’s tail, world-tree cuttings root in rich waters. Chase fish, flickering pain like sparks, flashing even without light. The pod eat densely. Debris falls, bubbles ascend.
Reversed: Queen of Cups, food as medicine Notice knots in the narrative, “many myths end with the promise that whoever hears them will be healed of sickness” Not forgotten: old promises, snake oil sold as medicine Mother of Cups in the North, we have missed the medicine of your narrative {serpents need to eat} […]
there was a time when i, viciously in love with you, started believing that there was a being, a living conductor of our feelings, like a—a fairy, i suppose, winged, tiny, invisible to the human eye but wondrously fast and glittering, and she, yes, she carried each warm thought you had about me to me, […]
When the blood and the hate in the eyes of your foes became too much, when the shine of blades became dulled in the dust, when the opening between snarled bodies desperate for survival offered, you fled— and the buruburu ate. It dined upon the shakes in your legs as you forded the wide river. […]
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 […]