please fold up your longings neatly,drawing the sleeves parallel and mirroredagainst the table of the body.Without them, you will not expire—the markets don’t want your soul,only your dry fingers,your palatable smile. The day before your flight,check in your love of open skyand the taste of bright dayson your spoiled-milk tongue.You
That morning the apparition retreated well before dawn. Giddens lay back and drifted for a while hoping for sleep. Furry luminescences clung to the venetian blinds like koalas, filled with (he imagined) hopeful awe over their drowsy human. Patiently Giddens took each one and returned it to the clock to
how I crawled beneath the under-eaves I am unraveling, and I need to be sewn up into grandma’s hand-embroidered farmhouse evening, into the threads along the beaten sulfur-stained couch, pilling open its gaping hole leaking Playboy magazines how I squeezed behind the armchair our pets were dragged down
—Chichén Itzá Before the divers bring the skull back to the surface, they say a quick prayer to Chaac asking permission to take it. With others’ bones and jade, this child had been cast into the hole to beg rain down from the god’s hoard of jars.
The sun is in a black mood today: a viscous coal corona extending this way and that. Hapless planets, meanwhile, entangled in their own dramas, pleading desperate solace from the distant stars. But this is the ultimate truth: for all their light, these constellations cannot be consolations. They
the tradition outside Baltimore is to pour white marshmallow sauce over balls of shaved ice, syrupy sweet with a flavor of your choosing. Still, I want to buy my baby a popsicle; an orange creamsicle to bring summer to his smile. Then cheeseburgers folded in yellow paper with the onions
This was a mistake. Jail? Deportation? Me? These thoughts tumbled about Kal’s mind as the robot escorted him down a bright hallway. Jail is for bad people—a place for the animals to rot in cages and devour each other in the jungles of Hell. Deportation is for those who don’t
During this pandemic, there is a lot of discussion of an apocalypse. “Apocalypse” implies the world didn’t already end. In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff expands on the impact of colonialism, particularly since contemporary groups of people were sold for their bodies and labor. She places the
I bought a tin of fava beans in that first frantic week of quarantine. I thought that it would be sensible to fill the cupboards with tinned food. Trips to the grocery store became missions to buy as many tins of tomatoes, tuna, and beans as possible. I felt like
Terrans have eaten the earth alive. The last rocket is leaving, carrying the rich and the useful. I am just a poet. I stay. I love the earth, especially when everyone is abandoning her. I love her when her face is ravaged, like an old page of a Marguerite Duras’
