What We Lose

& so I hear / in the beginning I am not / 12 & I hear hips swinging a wide bridge / a chorus swelling in the bass / of my chest & I break

Make it out to my sense of melodrama or maybe just my consistent need for I think it’s called attention?

We come from the mountains, we have wolf / in our blood, we have pinebarb.

He’s figured it out. The only way out is to swim, to break water, to surface. It is a long way up, that is how far we have drowned.

Busted furniture. Building materials. Car guts. Then a few feet away, loads more: old clothing, broken toys, soiled diapers.

When I got the phone call the third time Daveonte was shot, I knew it was the last. Still, I held my breath.

O bobolink. The bobolink is dead / at my door — found leaving my apartment / to school then to work. After some searching, / I guess it’s a bobolink—this lemon- / headed crow, this crumpled parachute cloth.

Jenny’s first change, like everybody else’s, was expected.

Tokador. When I say the word, there’s hesitation in my voice that I can’t help as soon as the first consonant leaves my tongue.

The heavy door slammed like the hatch of a submarine before descending under water.

I got my period two days ago but tell him I’m pregnant anyway.

When we were girls, we weren’t supposed to look adults in the eyes, and when we did, we could barely stand the intensity, felt like we were too close to a human kind of flame.

Featured artist Gabrielle Bates on the permeable boundary that exists between society and self