Within His Birdcage • Joe
Give me that handkerchief someone dropped on the corner next to the stand / where those suits are trying to swap sunlight for twenty buckets of swampland
“Black Dog Found” and other poems
Behind some airport some quiet organ -ization ignites a portable flare stack. Cindy, whose depression is tropical, is not yet a hurricane.
It’s me, Mom.
My parents gave up a comfortable life in China so that their children could have better opportunities.
On Race and Small Talk with the Neighbors
We found our home driving through the neighborhood adjacent to where I used to live when I was single.
Incel “Empowerment”
I have spent the last couple of weeks surveying online discussion forums populated by self-identified “incels,” a community of categorically straight men who claim their “involuntary celibacy” as a condition of oppression.
During a Beat Bobby Flay marathon I think — • Feast Day
I should study knife skills / or fish deboning. Have you / ever held fresh, dead chicken?
Fear of Long Words
Long after mother had said / “goodbye” to her piano, / Dad — dead drunk, / broke her mandolin.
#MeToo • An Ode to Hair in the Mustard
So #MeToo cuts her ponytail off, walks into a bar and takes a seat next to #MeToo and the bartender serves #MeToo whiskey from an eyedropper
Apostrophe
I was ten years old. We were against the wall, all twelve of us, like a criminal lineup outside the girls’ locker room.
Diasporic Fever Dream
The river / splinters / its many / tributaries, / veins feeding / new shores / The cutting stone / juts
Art in the space of social issues
