my nonna was the last to eat in her family, scooping bowls of pastina soup for her husband and children, hovering over the table in case there were pleads for more parmesan or pepper, serving seconds before she got her first; a comforting lunch turned lukewarm by the time she sits in the...
I let’s say: you are walking you are walking & you see exactly where the sidewalk stops & this is perfect you know exactly where one feeling end s & ano ...
“Do you remember us as children?” I don’t either, not entirely. I stood on tables singing and screaming poetry, so you must have been the quiet one. Now, turmeric stains my sleeves, and they braid dandelions around my fingers. Now, you’ve been experimenting with facial hair, and I’m too cautious to comment...
When I was born I changed my mother’s hair (What happens to a body is a daughter’s fault). I drank salt water mixed by a propellor On the back of a boat, Ate grapefruit my grandfather bought accidentally, Took a 500 a month stipend And some bullet points, Pushed on the doors I...
my first is perhaps the most foreign, yet it is the one of home. Cantonese. She lights the path forward, a promise of return, a call of the motherland beckoning us on. She brings home wayward sailors paddling peeling kayaks packed with families, Canadian-born. Almost at the shore, upset, upstart, unsure, the...
It was the first Winter with you. We bought a Christmas tree, a real one, the type that my mother would never let me have as a child. Once we had lugged it from the store and positioned it in the corner of the dining...
you turn your head in the shower curve your neck, just so and let the water run down your cheek like a hand cupping your face a palm thrumming with the heartbeat of summer rain. this is the part where you forget float on steam and the promise of a...
After they fish the waterlogged corpse from its resting place at the bottom of the lake, they arrange it on a table like a funerary slab. They detach the metal hooks from the dredging net and unwrap the layers of net away from the cold...
The woman two seats down with her slim cigarette is laughing into her phone, somewhere a phonograph plays a twinkly tune—How’d that get in here?—and the train, which is a living machine, thunders north. It’ll take us to where we need to go. Right now,...
A collection of half-poems written when half-asleep Have I Said Too Much? Do not speak of it. We know what happens When things are spoken of. Is it Salt or Am I Jesus? Something in my hair I wonder what. Is it salt or am I Jesus? What’s the reason I float? ...