Washing My Mother’s Hair
I.
My mother’s nightly ritual: sitting
on the floor in front of the hallway
mirror, a wet comb, the right
amount of hair. She ropes
a plastic pink curler
The Neighborhood
The wind grows furious as the grounds
around my house sicken. My neighbor’s
been pointing at a tree bordering our
properties with a gash down its trunk.
All I …
Excerpt From ‘Conversations With My Fathers’
i.
she brought an island’s worth of family to the states, her eye beaconed the promised land of mammon, and we came. when her dementia was really bad she worried she …
Honey Hole
The lower my estrogen dips, the more young
men (in their delicate, whole-body certainty
that shatters like that, like ice calved off a glacier)
grow downright adorable. …
ANTILLEAN EUPHONIA
Name a song further away than that.
Green-throated Carib,
Crested Honeykeeper.
I’m sitting in the post office parking lot
listening to the back-up beep
of a mail truck, this sheet
of sunstruck …
Etiology of Wound in the Wound
Let the wound caused by the serpent be cured by the serpent – Gloria Anzaldúa
I lose my fingers inside my solar plexus :: Worm
too deep, too poking, …
every night, i pray for a sword sharp enough, and a soft heart
in a dream
my hunters are slain
in a dream
repenters meet exile
in a dream
their surrender
softens us all,
ALL MAN’S LAND
Him —
In between this breath and the next,
I will find a 1000 burning sons
In the rage of a solivagant man
Who forgets he is an ever-blooming bud, still …
Dark Star
2 Black neurodivergent queers meet at a bar
One extends a rainforest palm
The other clasps and shakes Sahara
In the middle, a summer storm takes place
Settles them down
Somewhere …
the weight of every image
Let’s peel back the disparate and dehumanizing layers
of these different stories.
I can sit with the fact that they’re not monsters, these normal people
but the truth is stranger …
no love for a loveless god
“If lovelessness is godlessness, will you cast me to the wayside?”
—Moses Sumney, “Doomed”
I don’t know
if lovelessness is godlessness
I feel like lovelessness…for me…
is too …
Weathering
Cyclones are better than wildfires, than
smoke that blows hundreds of miles to
thicken the air. In the East Bay, high
levels of particulate matter from our
regular winter pollution …