I knew he’d never kill anything and it wasn’t that  I thought you wanted that deer to get killed but I had suspicion you  did not care either way and that indifference made me more sick but

First punch landed at Stonewall, Bleached reef, powder nose, drip-drip-alive, Nightmare waking and post-sleepfuck-stares, You. Bought You,

skateboards     dope and pogo sticks banana bikes    and popsicle sticks ten cent candy     up from five

the air thickened with silence. a small robin robs the brush of whatever red berries exude from the death of this place.

A soul is already carpeted in the divine and who is to say sorrow isn’t God? Who is to say love isn’t prayer? Who is to say time is always on our side?

Only when you can delete your Submittable account, and box your poetry books into a carton shipped to a country without birds or borders;

When four baby daughters up in the sky drain her anaemic heart, tears on Granddad’s photo against her riant chest, I crawl on her lap - My hug means to tell her, yes, she will see them again but please, not now.

There were car accidents, illness, and war. Dia de Los Muertos arrived just in time. I surrendered as the ants overwhelmed me. Beneath blue skies and papel picado.

Look for mentors and they’ll materialize, peer around corners, mouthing Psst with pursed lips,

A girl perched on a Translucent ocean In a dusty rose tunic On rowboat the color Of old paper, like the sky, The foam on the water,

Hovering over my body, in a tangled   mess of silver threads going snap, snap,   snap, I realise you were the fibre and tendon,   and glue that held while we ended   and began and ended and began;

but the berries do not know they grow because they grow and only know how to grow in the front circle in the backyard up and down the gravel road all along the fence line

Yet there the seed waits all the while and dreams of its own life — my only way of reaching it is with my paring knife.

I stood over him as he sat at the table setting the book down automatically in front of him he looked up and almost made eye contact asking, “Who do I make it out to?”

From one realm to the next, may Your essence forever sizzle and soar. Because whether You believed or not, despite the world not consistently admitting nor deserving it, You were always the hero we needed.

I am red like raag yaman. Red like stirring ardor, like relentless vikara, Like flesh awash with rasa, Wasteful, like Laal Ishq, Red like death.

because there will come a mile  where he is too weak to brush a horsefly  from the bridge of his nose, his head on a stretcher pillow  ringed by news microphones, surrounded  by the indifference of trees;

Winking bulbs, screaming vents. You need specialized footwear here. You need to wash workwear in a separate load due to its villainous grease.Senior members will ruthlessly remind. You must learn how to resorb the body’s complaints, fashion stout leather insides out of soft tissue.

When he scolded us, in our classroom with Sister Martin standing in back, about dating a non-catholic, his voice rose. “Drop them like a hot potato.”

This darkness is a blessing, these minor keys in your mouth a different kind of Pentecost—deep cuts cutting me loose from language.