How is it that you appeared in the enameled tin cup that you gave my husband because he said he liked it? This morning, he made coffee in our usual way, handed the cup to me, asked me what it tasted like. The coffee at my parents’ house. The house that has now been…

This woman, Lily, is long-boned, legs like skewers, empty breasts lying on furrows of ribs. She smiles at guests who kiss, kiss, planting babies in her lap. Food appears – magic; fish is chicken, porridge is soup…and beautiful. The old Lily was hidden in layers of faded muscle, dressed in blue-flowered polyester sacks. Fourteen children…

February is a dark heresy. Bare branch alters and dull shell-gray cathedral sky. Everything so hard and tired and I wonder if we will ever know green again. I chew on prayer seeds, hoping they taste of tree bud and April. I wonder if this is what it is to search for God. Alexis-Rueal is…

  Apparently tiger sharks eat license plates and rubber tires. Anything you put in front of them according to Shark Week. Once one bit a woman in half in Hawaii, but it was her fault for swimming at dawn. They are predators, after all.   She was an athletic swimmer, a Maui native. She knew…

  Self-will doesn’t run riot it crawls on naked belly ignores primal ooze never bathes and is always convinced that love is only a fix away.   I crawl amid constant cravings lose desire to feel real accept death in chemical form   still a part of me snubs Thanatos still a part of me…

I love you, not in the romantic sense, I don’t want to date you. I just love you in the way that I get tingles in my chest when I see you and laugh with you. The way I love you is a nervous kind of love, a cute little laugh over a steamed cup…

I ate men, one after the other, licking my fingers as I finished   each one.   I was feeding myself, filling up cold, star-less nights,   taking their fire and then wiping it away,   tossing the leftovers in the trash.   But men are not good nutrition.   My bones shrank and hollowed,…

  The word fernweh means I miss places I’ve never been Cities I’ve never explored And foreign roads I’ve never wandered through. I miss the simple wanderlust of it all Of waking up and not knowing what awaits Carelessly meandering and finding beauty in the pleasure of the unknown. And yet I still have an…

  I am a little girl kicking suns I am an old woman sitting in a pool of laughs I am the sun coming up every day to harden your heart   There’s a call to arms in all our red glass mouths white hot dripping glass blown by some kind of angelic thing  …