Sadness Isn’t The Only Muse
I still love books where nothing happens, / good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.
The Nightswimmers
I don’t want a husband, / I’d like a zookeeper.
Wayward
how far is the line / between / instinct and routine?
Preparation
I start with my father’s feet.
Vanity
It’s summer & all day we did what girls do . . .
to the fxck gxrls at sea:
my father only called me during his lunch breaks or on his way home. he never saved my number in his motorola flip phone.
Unarmed
This // is how the new grief travels, blackboys / digitized and hanging—light years away.
Once I Carried a Pediculus Head
Mom used a thin black comb to roam / my skull & pulled from it tiny-legged creatures / eager to escape the bars they nestled in.
Ghazal by/to/for Qandeel Baloch
If you can bloom anywhere, honey, do it in a loom, / let joy be stitched in the space between god and your eyes.
Poem of Thankfulness
Today i am thankful for morning frost / touched by sunlight and sparkling / on lawns and fields
Bloom
Four months with my mother, and my house plants remembered what it meant to live.
Water Will Carry You Home
The bay in my backyard always looked its most vulnerable at low tide.
The Year the Gate Came Up
As a kid, I noticed how my neighborhood unfurled in patches of uneven sidewalk, tufts of grass decorated with empty chip bags and broken bottles.
Reality, the Great Adventure
Imagine my bed queen sized and still too small, old and imperfect like my country.
A Charles Brown Christmas
Willie heard the hollow footsteps of his father’s worn black work boots coming up the cracked walkway and prayed for him to be sober.