Category: cover

At the Kingdom Hall, where we worship as Jehovah’s Witnesses, new mothers pass their babies around like the unleavened bread and wine. They are sacred. We (the women and girls) are all expected to partake.

Your fingers undoing me,
my shirt a pool of rusted guilt around your feet,
imploring us to be good girls again.

Nikah

another yellow grandmother
beaten, another young woman
pushed onto the tracks. nothing
brings out the asian in my mixed eyes more
than a paper mask.

– This is How the Body Knows

You exert so much energy leaning in, that you find yourself ground down to something resembling a fine spice. Like turmeric.

– Migrant Wish

                               The other matches
the movement, turning in turn, nestling
back close together like silver cutlery
in a velvet-lined case.

– Turnings

Look down at green & grey
landscape, its curve & flow,
its medley of soft sage, hard
nut brown, realize its bounds,
keep rising.

– Ascension

On blue nights, bumblebees flood my living room,

thinking the chandeliers as fluorescent hives—

a smorgasbord of paper termites bumping against

the crystalline bulb.

– Portrait of a Body as Spring

And then we got hysterical when that checkout boy smacked it and must have broken most of the chips into tiny pieces and then, when you yelled at him, he threatened to call the cops and kicked us out.

– Who Takes the Bus in LA

You unearthed love in the bottles of amber. It warmed your throat even when you alone manned the sunless shop. No one witnessed you stagger out of your chair.

– Mothers and Brothers

He wasn’t taking any chances. See, I was driving Route 66 all the way from Chicago to Santa Monica. He and his friends, there were a dozen of them altogether, were driving in  the other direction, from Santa Monica to Chicago.

– “Guten Tag, Baby!”