This city remembered I was black and said “no”
years before it came cooing with cash in hand,
so let the water rise until it splashes the marble.
Let them send a white girl to mop my flood later.
Tag: Spring 2022
In the blue light of your bedroom
I could be anything: housewife
mending the shadows as they drape
the clothesline, ghost boy, music
pulled from the belly of the lake.
am neatly obsessed with warm concrete
am neatly obsessed with my favorite water brand
am neatly obsessed with tercets & triplet hearts
am neatly obsessed with names that a hold a home
am neatly obsessed with streets that overflow in obscurity
am neatly obsessed with trails that go on for miles
am neatly obsessed with packages that read like blankets
The problem with me, he says, is that my parallel is too nice, thereby making me too mean. Apparently it’s because I clamshell up even though we live a 10-minute walk from a pho place with the best Bun Bo Hue in Sunnyvale, because even pho can’t drag me out of this house, from under its short ceiling that feels closer to squashing me into the ground every morning, from the rails of the balcony overlooking the street where I can hear gunshots every several nights even though this area is supposed to be super gentrified, full of software engineers and their 4K monitors.
These are not meant to be literal translations, but interpretations, or approximations, of Matsuo Bashō’s haiku. The goal in each case was to capture the essence of the original and add a sparkle of my own
In all my years of collecting, there’s only one thing I had as a child that I’ve not been able to find. A clear plastic sectional pen. Actually, it was more like a wand.
it’s the spaceship of your parents’
generation — dark glass in the dark
glass that is / the galaxy. plus
didgeridoo. I want to be heard
I whisk myself away, and
appetite follows. My stomach growls
when it’s horny–I mean hungry.
One of my favorite albums is
Sex and Food by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
When I go to sleep I do not see monsters, it is your slight figure,
the windows are open and you give it to me easy with sugar and
I still don’t know what too much of a good thing can do, sugar
leave the drapes open—those moonlines have kept me up for fortnights,