“Guarding their pages / like high school math tests, / they maintain the silence.”
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“A holy reading light— / the heads bow, lips move / over words, through atmosphere.”
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“you're in your ocean again / not seasick never seasick / but treading the swells”
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“A lost / permanent / almost / mine / but at least now my body / bows to it”
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“I evaporate. I pull ourselves together, / all of us up there, until / we rain.”
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“I wander down to the scrappy village, / and drop in at the butcher, where I pick up / rabbit, to brown, and simmer in saffron with rice.”
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“This ripe beginning of decay doesn’t bother me. It reminds me of uncooked chicken, oily, / the cheap kind. My mother would leave it on the counter for a whole day, forgotten about / it in a spell, scalding; spit soaring, palms open.”
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“He is oil, and oil is blood, and / blood is thicker than The Bible. His boots are thicker than the Bible. / His boots are leather made of old Bibles. His boots Are the Bible, / and the stool is the oil.”
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“Across generations, I—a child, an ass, / a pubic hair exposed—developed. / I longed for violation called love. / Dissociation altered my spirituality.”
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“A moment, then, of reckoning, / as the world burns and the institutions fall; / a weightless second dangling from the precipice of change / between the way things were / and the way they need to be.”
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“eyes watering like mine did at dinner after that call, my mom, / who lets the soft pages of her sorrel-colored bookstore bible lap at the toes of her shame like / waves, asking “why.” she didn’t ask “why” the way she asks my sister when she cries (her sins / are soft, white, and small. you can roll them in your hands like pieces of tender gnocchi)”
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