1. In the graphic novel the hero drives death the way a rancher drives livestock. Four-legged, voids pour from the hillsides—the shape, not the shadow, of extinction. 2a. +++++++…

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ always in my parents’ dream, no- +++++++++++ body is born daughter no powdery +++++ cheeks no white night, sighs and- ante no round- the-clock wishing I +++++++++++++ were married:…

  A womb sounds like a wound  in my mouth. A daughter portends losses. My mother  carried, in her womb, a wound without eyes. She grew up  with no mother,…

  Today I went looking for a word but it did not come looking for me so we remained lost to one another. I’ve not given up on what it…

  +++ —to Mosab Abu Toha On this hillside, apple trees are calculating the precise moment to heave into blossom they almost vibrate with responsibility and I do not know…

  Let’s talk about the quick memory of a green onion: How—snipped down to the white and, with water and omelet dreams, leaned in a Steelers double shot glass or…

  +++“I looked at photographs and suddenly understood that a photograph +++was a letter to someone in the future.” —Rick Barot during the pandemic, my mother was still dead. &…

  No one flies kites as once they did so now I carry shopping bags across your empty lots, topple careful mounds of leaves, find the gaps in window frames…

  Only certain things seem to stick. Gum beneath desks. Bird shit on windows. In a Princeton study, even physics slid away. The students were given the same test two…

  The standards call for a lesson on the afterlife of each religion. The students want to know what I believe in. The priests dried the king’s body with a…

  I cry in this poem. There’s a difference between weep, sob, and cry: weeping is silent, I weep on trains alone. I cry in this poem. Sobbing is so…

  +++Following the wrong god home we may miss our star. —William E. Stafford Oh god are you there yet they wish too hard for my metamorphosis for my tongue…