We’ve come to Des Moines for the funeral. Fitting / place: I’ve driven through every time I was leaving home to live / somewhere new.

The finest strand of dark green yarn / masquerades itself an accessory / wispy and frayed

This is how you keep your head down; this is how you thank God for this country: loudly so they hear / you;

The American dentist who shot Cecil the Lion once said, <em>If I had known this animal had a name … I obviously wouldn’t have killed it.</em>

in people. That whatever gods / I choose, I choose to love

I buy an old city bus, which will / whisk me away from this sinkhole I'm circling.

Last night I dreamt of / walking to Auger Beach / at dusk / only to find the tide / too high again:

In this moment that has come to happen / in other moments, the notes / of birds nestled in my asking.

The new year begins in winter white embroidery— / trumpeter swans and needle-slim herons piercing / drainage ditches.

“It’s the year of getting better,” her mother said as she walked into the room. It was Thora’s second hospital stay of the year.

My mother and grandmother were born in ‘the land of the lake,’ or La Comarca de la Laguna, a cradle of fertile land between the Sierra Madre mountain ranges in the northern Mexican desert

As I look out upon a landscape now heavily shaped by American colonialism, I know another world is possible.

A farmer with a wolf, a goat and a cabbage must cross a river by boat.

The year I meet granpa my hands mimic clouds. / Charybdis turning turpid pools / beneath his globes— vision I have awaited.

I started asking rivers to feed me as a child—literally, with flesh from fish, then figuratively, with flashes of comfort.