Power And

“How quickly this life does go by.” Tonight / I wrote the last letters / to my poetry students.

The river / splinters / its many / tributaries, / veins feeding / new shores / The cutting stone / juts

I was ten years old. We were against the wall, all twelve of us, like a criminal lineup outside the girls’ locker room.

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

Long after mother had said / “goodbye” to her piano, / Dad — dead drunk, / broke her mandolin.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.