Aviary
Milling about before the clinic
opened for a routine blood test,
I walked through a flurry of parakeets,
ducking as they swooped to feed
on blueberries & sunflower seeds,
& …
Poetry
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Exact Fits Make Me Superstitious
The fusty pinstriped suit jackets of larger men
are sagging the racks. Stretch full length in one until
your ears surge and still your fingertips won’t reach
out of the … -
Cats of Cádiz
Cats own the breakwater rocks of Cádiz. This has been decreed – or has grown up as a consequence of cats deciding it and congregating there: Cats own …
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Only the Water
for the stolen water, lands, and lives of Hawaiʻi, and especially those of Lahaina
to divert, to steal, to hoard,
to pollute, to contaminateto leak fuel into
to … -
It was now when it happened
Editorial Note: This poem twins a Māori legend of the pīwakawaka (New Zealand fantail) with an Irish myth concerning Diarmuid (son of Donn), and …
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7th North Street
Glowing cross red neon perched
like a robin on the church roof vaulted
made of stone thick tresses of ivyspill from it afternoon light scatters broken
images of the Virgin … -
WHEN THE LETTER ARRIVES
My dad’s letter sways the mailbox slant.
His name, reduced to a number, weighs
heavy, loosens the red plastic flag
from its hinge.Prison is a war …
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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 sheetof sunstruck …