"A poem to me is like a small cat that curls itself around your legs as you wait for the bus."

"Writing is a documented journey of self-growth as well as a way to be seen and heard."

"My work is agitational and energized toward transformation and hope—I build worlds deeply rooted in liberation and decolonial imaginings."

"I bring into the room my family and relatives first and always. They are who have shaped me. My ancestors too."

"Sometimes the most intimate and powerful work lies in the things that remain private and inaccessible for public gaze."

In this implantation there is thick blood / so red it sings to black, so viscous it could be shaped / in the hands like clay.

It’s two in the morning, and I remember what my grandmother warned me about again and again: “It’s the hour of ‘ushimitsu doki.’"

how can I love like this, / eating the bones of the sun, / its corpse of light, its flammable horizons—

What if, when you ran your fingers along the embroidery, you could hear the voices of your ancestors? 

Weather lights a mouth as vines drink sun in windowed rooms, / but I lied before.

"Tinkering a Way, Together: An Interview with Plastivap Inventor Mirukosee Balan"

Until the fodder of the fraught mind becomes the burnable legs of a useless table, / fuel only for compassion.

Don't they warn you against the misfortune / of unveiling desiccated bones to your green / sky?

And after / one hundred twenty days, we / pinched at her stems.

you’re burning what does it taste / like when god makes mistakes