For the free coffee and concentration of women / with low self-esteem. It's practically a service: / The way he winks at Evelyn

She is the fruit and its pored flesh. / This I notice first, learn myself through mother: / her blood and beat

are you afraid / that if you lose your illness / you will lose your identity?

we were decisive nodes | the disruption was decisive | monitors lighting up chunks of smoke | bodies wrapped in black kevlar | cords pulled from ports

Pretend that you found this on my desk on a sunnier afternoon than this one. / Outside my window, the cars in the parking lot across the street do their donuts as fanatically as always.

When I was younger, / I stood on a mountain of pillows / With a brave decision to swallow a / whole finger.

A snaky maze of untold, hasty trials on right / moves to make, embody my perfidious past / I've tried to run from, but eternally return to

In the year of the Rabbit / my half moon dance / for the ancestors. / The wrong kind of Japanese / again, / not camped enough, / apparently / not interned at all.

I cannot stand next to you or another member of your near-human species. You'll say something funny and I laugh so big you can see the coat of milky goopy envy on my tongue.

The bright lights can be blinding. But I hear them around me. The clapping. The cheering. I can feel the tent bursting with energy. I am the final act of the night.

…in a sanatorium or a jail cell. It doesn't much matter which. But,
for now, she’ll settle for a Greyhound. The grosser the better.

At Nuremberg, Jackson / revealed one human head, / severed, nameless, / shriveled beyond / a mother's recognition.

skin flakes rest in my lap, hands crossed, fingers / twisted left and right and up and forward but never down

Vines weave through the trail along wild raspberry and thorn, tiger lilies, ironweed, pinwheel-daisies and complaints afoot…

Bruises, scars, and gaping wounds / mar the walls of my parent's kitchen / at various stages of healing.

June— / In Central Valley, CA, a migrant farmworker / rises before the sun.

The new assistant principal's email signature / distracts me from whatever announcement. / An optimism so aggressive / as to insist on happiness.

There was no poverty. Only a honey farm / The bees drink and drip like an ocean. They're fleecing us, Moon, / what are we to do?

i plucked patience / off a tree long ago / shoved its gritty pit / inside my pocket

I don't recognize any of the food on the counter. My mother points at a table at the center of the room, tells me to wait. I recognize bread.