Poetry

“Learn this: keep your hair hidden tight behind your / back so it doesn’t betray you. There are few things worse / than being imprisoned by a fistful of hair innocently free / under moonlight.”

“in a splattered eruption / of leaking, lingering daybreak // we break / chalky, like the place between fruit and skin.”

“The trundling rubber of tanks and trucks / flattens za’atar thyme sprigs like bone.”

“I think the dahlias / forgot to bloom this year, you say / as a way of saying nothing. How do I love / the things I cannot touch?”

“the sun pulls oceans out our skin, bodies of water and asin / make nanay pinch her lips, pa kiss-kiss naman. she stuffs towels down our shirts and we / dance away, we full-fledged gravity defiers”

“He’s been scarfing elegies down, / so many he couldn’t fly— / but rest and soak in it, his back to the sun.”

“I preferred breaking the brown water with stones, / learning how big an opening I might make / into the murk managed by Army engineers; / but you wouldn’t let me.”

“Noah sent the dove / and the dove found a branch around the corner — rested / stretched, enjoyed some alone time.”

“Forest hugs / me close, the occasional sharp thorny fingernails / tracing taut calves or hoggish spider webs / licking face.”

“Someday, her grief will / morph into a marble child. / It will stand in the living room for // visitors to see.”