When the fog rolls in, we forget / about searching for the right song, / about directions and the path / and time

it's monsoon season in the high desert and the surgery's two weeks from today. in 14 days i'll be back from albuquerque, tucked into bed…

Combustion engines betray us. / Their carbon paradox hums in idle driveways.

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.