Proximities

There’s a legacy of stuff passed through my family, especially on my father’s side.

Endings begin with a rumbling: / clap of thunder at the top / of the finale, creak and release / of the bus as it rises from its bow, / first vibrations of the tornado / siren.

Empty basilica, wood slat / walls, white Jesus expressionless. / Blue eyes and blue eyes and blue / eyes and more inaccuracies / in the courtyard.

Are / sleep nets / sparse / dense / or selfish / in their / weaves?

In our youth, glaciers winged free to the highway.

First I wake the body / to unring a bell— / as the proctor rolls up I slam down right on the tit / of the sexy mermaid we sculpted / in the sand pit.

In December, Karen and her family left the murky skies of Philadelphia behind and touched down at LAX on a breathtakingly warm and sunny day.

If the bath is a womb, the shower is a river, a rain. Distance between droplets makes a better clean, not deep, but a clearing.

This past November, I was a visitor in a house with many presences: a mouse in the ceiling, ladybug colonies in the doorframe, accumulations and whispers in the hollow of the wall.

it’s 1906 / my great grandfather Sam lays tefillin / for the last time then leaves / them on the bedside table, / a loosening; the leather straps / left to dangle

Started telling my grandmother / I love her. Loudly, daily, over video calls with / my mother, my mother holding / the phone.

The frangipani’s last falling flower makes its way to a graveyard on the passing-by shroud?

I am dirt, bruised by lake light. white rain, mauve / clouds, the sky’s breath leaking.

They make border out of moving body / and announce that it is dying / and that Mexico owes the U.S. water / but not from our wet backs.

A man I didn’t love / died today—a growth / in his colon’s fragile spiral.

so i keep renewing her favorite book / on our shared library card.

I would like to tell you about my mother’s erratic heart, or share what I know of Las Patronas

A little rasp in its throat whittled the exhaling air. The auk laid down at last / and stayed there, its breath / so quiet I didn’t know when / it gave way to a greater quiet.

The problem with draining the world from your head / is what rushes in to take its place.

Here, lens flare recalls the burn holes in her nightgown.

He owns seven New Balance shoes, all rights / that have lost in this house their one-time partners.

I said goodbye to my father for the first and last time, after his death, in the quietest place in the United States.

Mixed media artist Ellen Wiener on the featured art for issue 16.

soundtrack: fall in love (remix), slum village / because it just might, / i dance like my life depends on it.

the mother circulates through Berlin’s arteries, / smacking through streets and bike lanes until a / DHL worker delivers her to my front door.

Still dark out when my father pulls / the trigger.

in the beginning there were no lines no markers of where & what belong to whom / or why

In the house is a horse, or the house itself is a horse.

We sit across from each other to play the game Othello.

Every poem I write opens with a parent. How else / do I bless the ones that birthed me?

The summer before I published my first — and so far, only — book, my husband Alonso and I finally saved enough money and time to spend a week in Paris.

Begin with a name.

Every time I look up, it’s still there – the skeleton of the once bustling village where my / father grew up.