I jam my key into the ignition, starting the car and wishing I had five minutes earlier to give it a chance to warm up. The car alarm beeps for a moment. I snap my seatbelt on, cutting the noise. The steering wheel feels like ice against my naked fingers. If I were in a […]
Pilgrims
were on the shades when I left this morning, the bitter cold biting my cheeks. Threw my voice in the wind prayed it wouldn’t come back until you come . back. They were on the shades when I left, blots of ink on white plastic peering through the slats at all the bodies I’ve collected […]
The Sound of Snowfall
I don’t see my sister enough to argue with her. Not once we became adults, anyway. Of course, like any pair of siblings (maybe any pair of sisters, so close together in age, they’re often confused for being twins) our childhood was a string of disputes. The earliest I remember was my golden-haired sister chucking […]
searchlight
Maybe if I write these words slowly, it will make them hurt less. I can’t remember what I wrote yesterday, but it had that dizzying effect that swings sometimes have: nauseating, like maybe I should have kept my feet planted on the ground. But I have always loved the idea of flying, and being on […]
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my mother wonders why I am never home and my love is never quite certain why I’ve gone mute and my sisters keep telling me they miss me and I can’t look them in the eyes anymore can’t tell fanciful and fantastic lies anymore . went to meeting today discussed plastic bags and pillow cases […]
For Pembroke
wear my bathrobe to pick Lil Cobra up from school administration asks if I’m unwell let them believe I’m diseased it’s more entertaining that way . he messaged me last night wanted to know when he would see me again I shrugged and shook my head don’t want to hear from him, really . dreamt […]
smelling salts
I’ve got the hands of a woman with nothing left to give the feet of a woman with nowhere to go, not even home— tú haces que mi corazón lata but, that’s not right either, is it? we lived in a bubble, the real world exposed to the pretend, now, I fall ill my immune […]
In the other room,
I hear my grandmother whisper, “Is she really thinking about…?” And my mother answers, “I don’t know,” exasperated, “I try to stay out of stuff like that.” And I am in my room, poetry pressing against my eyelids because it’s easier this way, easier than seeing the rain clouds. Am I really thinking about…? My […]
november welcomes me
you take me to the community table where I like watching all the old men socialize with one another but today my eyes translated their lives into death that one, with the nicotine stained beard, he’ll stumble into the heart attack named widow-maker and that young man, with the black pencil on his waterline, an […]
Look to the Living, Disregard the Dead
it happened again last night, heard him in my dreams again wakefulness greeted me with the memory of his vacant eyes, fixed upon the ceiling above and I’m studying the star-shaped tattoo on his chest, chanting his name over and over in my head again sorry I haven’t been home in a couple days, it’s […]
