a mouth began / in the south east corner / of the continent where / a tribe of teeth / once shared rice

I carry a large box to the post office on Sixth Street making my way up the few stairs.

in 2029, i wake up next to a stranger. / the word husband for us is like paprika — / it adds color.

In 2007, I had just freshly graduated from high school. I was a year ahead of my class and had put in the extra work due to acute boredom

“The car is hemorrhaging fuel,” I told Dad over the phone as we approached Grandma and Grandpa’s place.

For three years, I boarded a bus in West Pullman, then transferred to the Red Line train to attend Chicago’s Roosevelt University.

There are things you can’t ask at the clinic. Among your prescribed list of acceptable questions: Where is the bathroom?

Since the end of the Cambodian Civil War in 1975, and the horrific killing fields following the next four years, Cambodia has never recovered.

There’s a phrase for it, the way / I’m lately loving like a river / is pressed to my door

Like all nights, this one was muggy and black. It will rain tonight, he thought as he rubbed his arthritic knee. Maybe.

my hair sways long / black streams cascade / down my back / somewhere, skies illuminate after somber rain

Many of the “Indians” — that’s what they call themselves and what we call them too — in our small Alaskan town live in a separate community called Saxman.

It is unseemly to blow your nose into a tablecloth. If you share a / bed with another man, keep still. If you pass a person pissing, do /not greet him.

Out past the bridge, past the edge of town where the old houses give way to the stretch of firs that continues for a few miles before dissolving into shrubland, there is a little church

The topic of “real” American identity and assimilation has never been so simultaneously divisive and uniting.