Are there times where we can’t compromise our beliefs because to do so would be to forfeit the core of our beings?

The reality is that everyone’s just trying to get by — the difference is in what each individual, each collective, and each nation is willing to give up in order to survive.

Hers is a country of dead people. All those graves scattered over the hill, the white crosses, the angels with their hands on their chests, the pinwheels that spin over children’s graves.

On the phone, you tell me you were frozen, then brought back to life. The freezing shrunk you and stretched you, and you became ugly.

You will be twenty or twenty-one or twenty-two, no younger than nineteen, no older than twenty-four.

I was looking for Samuel Bernstein’s novel, Lulu, at The Strand, a giant stack of books teetering in the crook of my right arm.

My interdisciplinary art practice evolved from drawings I made while sharing open and public spaces with others.

I fall into the mountain side; I burn in / to the twisting serpent of chambers / hidden there. I am wild for the underlength / of tunnels and beautiful men who run like blood.

Give me that handkerchief someone dropped on the corner next to the stand / where those suits are trying to swap sunlight for twenty buckets of swampland

Behind some airport some quiet organ -ization ignites a portable flare stack. Cindy, whose depression is tropical, is not yet a hurricane.

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.