Sometimes it was just a humming / Which came through the windows at night

The tip of the stalk / draws / the tossed flower —

In 1988 our fledgling nation drowned again in blood and clamshell clanging, oh how holy the flesh on pagoda stairs

In the years that formed me, I poured myself into classes, hobbies, extracurriculars I was told you’d like: Latin, Mandarin, Multivariable Calculus, Swimming, AP Physics.

My parents were scheduled to divorce on Valentine’s Day.

A cheap print of an aspen grove / In the exam room

What happens when fantastic / becomes fan-fucking-tastic

Riding an ant, we seek a fairy’s cave / A realm of long life, where butterflies flutter

a row of cypresses towered over the road / we knelt at the water’s source

Today I am empty, fasting till sundown

I’m afraid of what’s beyond the dishes / we wash in retrieved lake water.

Finally at the gallery, the couple (all fiction of them), / she in that white bustier, he with the cutout

I look in the mirror / I look at the Indian women

The car in front stalls

The name of God is sufficient / for me.

Build your life on white, on silence and on stillness.

A mirrorless story. My father’s mother’s name.

Even after some time, I am still the weeping wound in the houseplant, / tearing easily.

Don’t you miss me as if I were dead? // That’s how you’d like to be loved.

there will be no more baptisms

The officer’s fists on the door

To wait for something to open, that’s optimism.

Another year of rain and terrible air, then I see the street again —

The night the flag of the British empire came down / in my country, the cry of a mottled wolf was heard in the wild.

Forgive me, I did not mean to copy your life.

A grain of rice cannot feed a hundred mouths

Together, above the kitchen sink, we peeled / a hundred russets.

I was not dressed correctly when / motherhood interviewed me.

My Birth State can’t possibly drive interest

Another poem mannequin- / Ing the body.

there are thousands of days left / tens of thousands if we’re lucky

It was the winter of my life. Afternoons, / I watched light fade / from the faces of brownstones.

Not even children who brave the street / Will notice the robins, mistaking them for nightingales.

The last man who touched my tits cut them off

The hottest summer on record I couldn’t open the windows.

I think back / to childhood— // to this state / & its former rainfall

I tell the oracles that no one has touched / me, that plenty have looked, drunk their fill / on my (   ).

Thirsty / doesn’t describe what we’re looking for, / yet for some it means desperate for another’s touch.

my tongue is at war with a new language

I’d been undoing myself for years. / Why would this day be any different?

At some point, fathers stop unraveling / in private, don’t they?

I won’t know how to daughter till it’s done.

“You can see the pure it-ness / of anything if you cut it right”

“Say then that I am overflowing / & nobody’s fool & did not give up"

Not like you think, but yes, he’s upside down.

more than the men, even. The ones who looked / like I looked.

How could I not praise the Chinese grandmother / rocking her floral print tracksuit?

“while the aunties sit weaving an awful dress of effrontery / —and I wish we could be alive in several ways but this one”

There’s a man who sits at his desk this evening, / bearing witness to the end of days.

“The world is a list of things / I keep from my father.”

We’re going to see the angels / my father says but in Spanish

I was mesmerized by how willing her skin / was to leave her.

I went to the doctor and found out / there is an empty city inside me.

I lean my open neck against yours. / The miracle always returns with a hunger.

Memory is no solid monument but liquid’s / twins of substance and ceaseless swell.

I am destined to infuse / survival with meaning, like honey clotting in syringes.

the etymology of gun is hunger

One simulation to another, am I wrong.

you have trouble saying your name and you say it anyway

My cadastre of flesh / dissects me right to the bone

I am so afraid of being troubled and alone at the end of this world

We kept the kills quiet / amid rows of pale clover

Before you were born I binge-watched Hoarders.

We used to think that refugees / were of one kind / and we never knew / that we were too.

I stretch my neck into the next life.

I have no name unless I make / it back alive

we believe in ourselves / more than we believe in anything else

mijo—i know you have seen the night / as an excuse to hold your body like a bottle

What are days? Just him and / the left-over spiders.

This is where our devouring / comes home

in case we have forgotten the word love, we will know its symbol

A poem for Puerto Rico.

"I am black wench, / wench Sally, African Venus, Sarah Hemings"

The serrated are only / 
for dining, the curved ones for husking / 
muscle from the bone

When the opal stone appears, I’ll lean into it. But terror is a runaway train.

This is how we knew she had / already died at least once.

In St. Louis, America's nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.

Maybe you spiked the dirt / With your snare of shivers.

Your voice is my favorite album, / you left but your bones are still here.

We want what God wants: to be pure.

how we are so many dependents, / how one headlight will do for now

My name // came reeling towards me from a net / of insects that said it was your mouth.

One girl might leave a trail of crumbs / Behind her. One might leave a line of poured-out gasoline.

I have trouble naming myself / In a language I can find.

any word traced to its origin is a small boy begging for water

A migrant learns to love as mothers do, by trying and trying again.

The fight to extradite El Chapo.

Praise instead the night, its starless, basilica void.

Worry and console, worry and console: it’s how I stay in shape.

I came out hot as a punched jaw

They said burn the keys but only our hair caught fire.

Whatever you touched grew more like itself

Oh it’s a gold rush of expectations this place.

I pick him up, and he unravels into a sheet.

Call his neck plum, when it bruises say the skin makes it easy to digest.

Trumpets skyward, you know about it, side eye, you know how goes silence in the rock-n-roll

I vote with my feet. I vote with my wallet. I vote in person with my vote.