GASTROPODA

An outlaw, a swindling hero, I was also just a woman. Born with all the privilege a girl could have, I looked up at the evening sky for a...

We never imagined life without them. Then one day, with no eruption or rending of earth, Poof — peaks, slopes and valleys are fields,...

Why don’t you tell us so tell us so we know where you come from so we know how to talk to you so we know what you do for a living so do...

The snow has finally left us—the last bit of it melted into a puddle at the top of the driveway. Foraging robins scatter across the...

How did you come up with the title? The title was actually where the idea for the poem derived. During a specific meditation practice the...

after Hanif Abdurraqib God, I can no longer tell the difference between divine intervention and wishful thinking. Perhaps that’s proof of...

Smile sweetly when his bag whacks you on the head as he makes his way to the back of the bus. Whisper ‘no problem’ even though he hasn’t...

Move through your grief as if through water. Clench and kick and tread through its density, feel the salt wash over you, sometimes a...

Faces chalk white and bone, we sit behind the casket, the sorrow in the room enough to cradle our bodies the same way the marble sky...

On the first day of August, the lake in the forest swelled like the belly of a waterlogged corpse. I sat on the shore and wrote a book...

You’re asking to check my pulse by peeling back my skin and ribs and feeling for the beat yourself; you’re asking for two-in-the-morning...

i know things are getting bad again when milk chocolate makes my teeth go jazzy, bone whimpering and dazzling in a waltz with the tongue...

sun scorch winter kill heart rot bone meal bare root internode heirloom rhizome overseed scarify cold frame evergreen halophyte xeriscape...

The lady in yellow didn’t dance at the show. Sad. Back in grad school, there was this happy-to-tagalong girlfriend of another student....

at the bus stop the cosmos disintegrates at the edges wind spits a leaf into the gutter swirls it through a galaxy of mud all these dead...

I am going to prepare one of your favorite meals. You will like it, I’m sure. To start I will put dried anchovies, onions and some...

I know I can’t stay hidden forever. I have little choice, even if unseen, must find again my voice and remember, remember how sparrows...

How did you come up with the title? I wanted something longer that embeds you into the scene and what I have seen before the poem begins....

I was born to live on land like the others before me. For a time, I did, until my legs started to curl just below my knees. It wasn’t...

(after Safia Elhillo's January Children - the lovers) Kaffi in the nineties My mother with a  vintage square satin scarf tied to her head...