Fall 2023: Rot
Spring 2023: Reverence
Fall 2022: Bridge
To be loved / Is to wake up to a bowl of steaming hot 稀飯 / Tender, bright orange 地瓜 floating / In a sea of glistening 白飯, / To have the tablemat set out already
Her Prayer like a touch and boiling / Shiver turning the dust-clouds into rain. // He stands before a lectern named Wash / Where he uncoils ribbons from the holes / He cut through his fingertips the callouses
The water was brown. / The Brabantio family had adamantly tried to ignore this fact – even the more progressive members politely refused to comment.
She hugs her arms to her chest, wearing a white baby tee and velvet black lounge pants, dangling her legs over the edge of the bridge when I join her.
Please come sit next to me- / I want to lay my head in your lap and / whisper about the boy you love / as you braid flowers in my hair. Once, / I knew you like I knew myself, and / now, I wonder if history is all we / have left
When I was eleven, I started taking the subway alone; I learned what it meant to pick myself up and walk myself down as the train roared rickety […] I was a traveler in my own city
[They…] are larger than when she last spent time observing them. A headache threatens her temples as she questions yet again what might make this home look right for a family
On the same bridge where my brother threatened to cast his body into the river, you tell me: “Wouldn’t it be fun to jump?” We sit together on the railing. Your eyes are the same color as the sky
An old man with his fanny pack radio strolls by […] One of the girls sweats past him and wonders if swinging her arms like that would propel her forward in this deathly test of fitness
That was the week the grapes were swelling and bruising / Purple, dust-seasoned. Again / We filled our pockets until the grapes, sun-burnt / And sun-ripened, burst
what do you feel in the silence / what do you feel in the warmth / what do you feel in the center of your being / whatdoyoufeel between / silence what–wheredoyoufeel / the warmth lies
There was a sale at Ace Hardware today: forty percent off washers, so Ophelia walked home with tiny metal discs pinging around in his coat pocket
The fishing hole was bigger than it should be […] careful examination of the clean cut into three inch-thick featureless ice would reveal that the hole was not merely bigger than regulation
I walk with you through a field of wild grass on a path laid out for us by others. Dandelion seeds float slowly, discernible against the blue sky, like white snowflakes that fall in other parts of the world
A blonde woman stands on the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting. Lifting her hand, she brushes a strand of perfectly curled hair into her scarf. She waits patiently, eyes staring off into the distance
Once upon a time in a land far, far away there lived three sisters. The oldest sister had long, dark hair and knuckles that hissed when they were cracked
For this solitary space traveler, what had started as a bold expedition to new horizons for his people had become a disorienting journey through a galaxy
[…] the desert hues that usually fade into the background fill the entire landscape, and I wonder, what happens when the whole world around you becomes the colors that usually uplift other things
The entire town mocked him and some threatened him with pesticide when he approached, but no one had the heart to tell him that his father was not a wildflower human
Here is– the monument, / The bare room heavy with artifacts: / Strange velvet balls, stacks / Of letters, papers, / Old journals full of hypotheticals
Adja parts the last section of hair with the rattail comb to hook in another box braid. She’s working on the last two braids of Michelle’s hair, a first-time customer
We met that night on a drawbridge, in the rain: you with golden hair plastered to your face, tangling up in long eyelashes your mother likes to call ‘ladylike’ and you tend to label as ‘inconvenient.’
Spring 2022: Break
