Writing · Poetry
Poems shaped by the emotional register of experience—by place, memory, history, and the shifting edge of the sea.
At home in the country of my childhood, I went to the markets and saw the numbers tattooed on skin become old, a sleeve falling back from a forearm, the ink of the camps faded and wrinkled. That was when I stopped telling people I’d survived a test, or an awkward
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And on a night like any other night, when the barkeep cut him off when the girlfriend cut him loose when his only option was a razor under a flickering florescent light—
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And at the end of his contract he comes back from the heat the pulse of the land the baobab trees, the savannah the rhythms of the drums— from the fever dreams of Malawi.
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Hotshot. They say you have to love it a little to hate it so much and on a day like any other day a fire like any other fire surrounded and took you: burnover, they call it, when there’s no place to go but into the flames. Watching the fire come nearer and you’re already closer to it than anyone else would dare, hotshot,
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Celebrate this day as solstice, the beginning of sunshine summer that brings life to this tourist town long bright days lengthening into sunsets, the smell of suntan oil and frying food but the sun always sets,
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The man in the seat ahead is impatient. Not fast enough, he says. The wrong brand of Scotch. The flight attendant keeps smiling, even though she’s been up eighteen hours, hearing him complain for the past five.
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My mother (dying of cancer, smoking until her last breath), angry about research dollars: those people don’t deserve it. They brought this on themselves. She never saw the irony.
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You remember the film where the man played a trick on the woman’s mind? He hid her keys over and over until she believed in her own insanity rather than his cruelty—an easy thing to do.
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There was another suicide yesterday on the beach, by the sea: the dunes behind him, the ocean in front, on the second day of April.
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My aunt died in a cellar under the old City Hall. I don’t know how she’d come to be there or what exactly they did to her: there were rumors but by the time I was born they were almost all dead, the ones who could have told me.
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The planes flew into Manhattan and the white people asked, why us? We thought we were safe. Living in the luxury of that delusion, we baked Disneyland cakes and God wore the red, white, and blue; our anger when proven wrong was so immense it engulfed
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