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.

My mom acted like she was just one good fuck away from becoming a millionaire.

Six hours and counting. Six hours until she touched down in another world, another life.

a sophomore from art class. could he paint. i kept / his scraps of craft paper / and stray eyelashes in a jewelry box my grandma bought / in italy.

Mr. Dai called to inform his wife that he would be leaving directly from work to pick their daughter up from the airport this evening, so Mrs. Dai would have to buy the fish herself.

I am chocolate man looking at blue man flashing his lights as he stops milk chocolate woman and light cafecito man.