My parents gave up a comfortable life in China so that their children could have better opportunities.

We found our home driving through the neighborhood adjacent to where I used to live when I was single.

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.

I should study knife skills / or fish deboning. Have you / ever held fresh, dead chicken?

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

Who holds power in our spheres of influence and why? Can we control power, both in others and within ourselves?

“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