Long after mother had said / “goodbye” to her piano, / Dad — dead drunk, / broke her mandolin.

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

I was ten years old. We were against the wall, all twelve of us, like a criminal lineup outside the girls’ locker room.

The river / splinters / its many / tributaries, / veins feeding / new shores / The cutting stone / juts

“How quickly this life does go by.” Tonight / I wrote the last letters / to my poetry students.

It tasted lemony, a smudge of sweet acid on the tip of her tongue, hot from the sun where it had been growing until the moment she plucked it.

“You have such a beautiful voice,” the director said guardedly.

When they come to see the stove, they inhale a simultaneous woosh, the kind of sound that only comes from air moving into the lungs through a constricted trachea, just a hint of a vibration in the back of the throat.

One Friday each fall, Missionary Baptist girls from all over the state of Mississippi were excused from school to journey in their church vans to the cabins of Camp Garaywa for the annual Girls Missionary Auxiliary overnight retreat

Trees living in their skin-smell, Appalachia has no need of my white poet / blouse and ripped jeans. The world as I knew it, gone, white as cotton balls

My sense of what it means to be an American woman, a queer Aries snowflake, shifts every time I leave and return to my own country.

Julia was a single mom, so she did what she had to do.

how is it / that you force-fuck / and call us whores / you tell us we only care / about your size, your wallet / when we’ve bought you flowers / yet there’s only dirt in your palms

I find the court bundles, / find the judge who / smeared my face with war paint, / fingered my veins for Pakistani valves like / my blood could be distributing homemade bombs.

I am my father’s pusher. Just this once, tonight. Mash the button.