Poem
Elegy for Threatened Words
It wasn’t that the cake was vulnerable
to teeth so much as meant for eating—a mouth’s entitlement,
or, in indulgence’s own belly, a Lego project of cells, a fetus.
Erosion Infrastructure
I took in a tired traveler.
What holding my bedframe.
Up off of the tired floor.
What set of cinder blocks grating.
Concord Grapes
What would it be like to belong
entirely in your own body, or in your own country, or at
your own address?
Inauguration Poem
Do you know what it’s like when a body twice yours
holds you down in the room where you make your life
until you wouldn’t know how to move even if he wasn’t
holding you down and then he splits you further open
The Ingenuity of Animal Survival
Deep in the enzyme is the shape of home.
Deep in the code is the architecture to nest.
In the Event of an Apocalypse, Be Ready to Die
But do also remember galleries, gardens, herbariums. Repositories of
beauty now ruin to find exquisite—
Two Poems
But the barefoot kids of the Wagenburg know
the trees must all stand to make the light and shade
work the way it does, their palisades against regulation.
Two Poems
Demise might not happen today what do I see
a large woman walking with two canes a striation
of exhaust fluid pooling in a left-over rain puddle
from a downpour this morning that I watched
Song of the Andoumboulou: 206½
She wanted to tell a story shrouded in
mist at the beginning, to give and to
withhold in giving it, the telling not the
tale
Route 1095
Each parenthetical a haunting sour stuck inside my mouth, tucked under my tongue, almost masked by the saccharine taste of pesticides from the garlic fields.
Two Poems
Just imagine the surprise at finding yourself
invented, called on—first by one, then another,
then endlessly, and for some
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