Jars of stunted-self languish there still, in the half light. Stacked fat slices of summer pear. Peeled, cleft and without mouths, they kiss up against the glass.

And my father angry at traffic, always. Still they are driving on the screen past midnight. Sometimes we would arrive in the dark, my grandmother in the kitchen waiting.

Death is eternal truth, but death is also resurrection.  Death is as old as the sea and as new as the monsoon that births new life.

The train crosses a bridge. I toss a coin through the window and see it twirling with silvery flashes of light toward the river below.

Inside desire goes to seed—sweet fleshy folds that dawn fruit—fecund, pink, and dew that glistens, granatis—a rose nests in a lotus—

The fish hook lodged in my brain probes its freakish proximity with the harpoon throbbing behind my sternum. Raspberry

I mean this to say: my sons will not put their hands on people who have not asked for their hands—like in a community pool when a girl is fourteen and had not seen this boy since 6th grade;

Bred in the wild wild tropicanas outcropper from fecund alleys of hortigunculturists Hit the road jackfruit and don’t call me pumpkin he says spitting nectar on the Konkan

This was in the late morning, Sun. You threw down the heat there too. We took the cloud of blackbirds as a sign and got moving, but Colleen didn’t like the quiet.

What’s this book about? she always asks, and I read her my favorite part with the fig tree, the fruit

I finally relented and placed one on a tea towel next to my pillow. It made a startled little snore.

Scry-skapers horporate saidquarters mirrored mansions grancy feed-towers daring town the latural nandscape

I slipped a dream or two between pages 102 and 103 of the handsome volume of poems on my bedside table. Like you would a leaf. The one collected from the pile under the Oak’s shadow.

I’m on the sidewalk opposite Verdi Square kissing a married woman passionately and thinking oh my god you fool what are you doing because

Everything here is the same—the same faded streetlights and the same fast food and the same homeless people lining the space between buildings.

The cold rain at 2 a.m. beats against America, and by then you had already left. A ghost, two clowns will dance on the ceiling until the sky turns grey-white.

A wizard, on the other hand, could cast spells with their wands. Radu had two Magic Wands instead of one. To double the power. Radu and the wands were inseparable.

The body itself is the wound, deep and deserving, skin/hair/breath all edges of the scab.  Muscle tension/eye strain, pain beneath the teeth, gentle reminders of the harbor itself.

Fade Into You melts down lumbar curvature. Gish, she sings her lullaby. No fissures form in the foundation, no 737 jet stream goodnight.

the way you stood at a stove stirring tall pots of beans in a dank soup kitchen            where tracked snow melted in pools

the height where space travel becomes animal instinct. The theory of constellations: take a cosmic razor to the horizon, where the spoils of day,

One. On the eve of your citizenship's trash day, and especially if you’re an eager beaver, wait until at least 7:30p to take your trash out to the curb. (9 or 10p is kinder, and 11p is kinder yet,