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...
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...
I want to be a Girl The way that angels are girls: With flowing white cotton hugging waists, Bare feet that won’t be made to bleed by the glass they step on. Ephemeral physicality, but a forever impression. But I am only a girl In that I blush when you say...
streaming into the liffey down the street, rivers white and lovely ...
I never liked country songs until I listened to them, and you never liked me until you met me, so I guess we're even. And every few months, I find flowers molding in my textbooks and in all my drawers are those crushed paper swans, the ones you folded from...
the words fell off my tongue like the filling from a tangbao skin inflections leaking out the sides spilling broth down my chin my throat burned but i swallowed the sound. ...
Remember running from the top of the hill telling stories about skeletons in the forest, Years later you buried yours there and I never knew All I had was a pencil sharpener shaped like a house and a spelling bee trophy that didn’t belong to me What did I do to...
It's not so much the full bottles As it is the empty glass. A broken promise Stale and sticky on the crooked coffee table. I’ll never drink whiskey again. It’s not so much the noxious assault in the doorway As it is the broken flag on the mailbox. Even when empty, I pushed...
The bartender starts work now. He doesn’t drive. He walks. I guide: a vanilla glow peeking at winter’s chalk drawings. He goes in through the front door. I go in through the window. The bartender’s lips are dry. He fills craters with liquid. Warm in the stomach. Water on the moon. Drops sift through space, down our cheeks, like...