Willful Innocence

When a group of Alaskan women flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with Senator Lisa Murkowski during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, I wanted to be on the plane with them.

The chalk taste of prescription pill / washed down / with too-sweet lemonade. I only take it / because you do, and I wonder / if you get high so you can tolerate me.

Mama was born in the year of the Dog. In the Chinese Zodiac, dogs are known to be loyal and stubborn, of which she was both, but mostly I thought of her as brave.

Beyond dead. Torsos glazed with epoxy, exuding an icy sheen. A spinal column exposed, its flimsy cord dangling from a robust sacrum.

It came from a catalogue. I opened / the plastic bag inside the plastic bag / and out tumbled fabric fine as flesh.

The topic of “real” American identity and assimilation has never been so simultaneously divisive and uniting.

Out past the bridge, past the edge of town where the old houses give way to the stretch of firs that continues for a few miles before dissolving into shrubland, there is a little church

It is unseemly to blow your nose into a tablecloth. If you share a / bed with another man, keep still. If you pass a person pissing, do /not greet him.

Many of the “Indians” — that’s what they call themselves and what we call them too — in our small Alaskan town live in a separate community called Saxman.

my hair sways long / black streams cascade / down my back / somewhere, skies illuminate after somber rain

Like all nights, this one was muggy and black. It will rain tonight, he thought as he rubbed his arthritic knee. Maybe.

There’s a phrase for it, the way / I’m lately loving like a river / is pressed to my door

Since the end of the Cambodian Civil War in 1975, and the horrific killing fields following the next four years, Cambodia has never recovered.

There are things you can’t ask at the clinic. Among your prescribed list of acceptable questions: Where is the bathroom?

For three years, I boarded a bus in West Pullman, then transferred to the Red Line train to attend Chicago’s Roosevelt University.

“The car is hemorrhaging fuel,” I told Dad over the phone as we approached Grandma and Grandpa’s place.

In 2007, I had just freshly graduated from high school. I was a year ahead of my class and had put in the extra work due to acute boredom