i. a mother can devour the evolution of her daughter’s tongue After ESL class, a mother and her daughter wander into the corner where flowers crack through the concrete.…

  Again I watch a cousin           fitted for a wedding gown ++++++lace and strings tightened       across the back, whale elegy written across the spine          Fingers clasped around…

  I bury my bloody underwear in the trash out back where coyotes yip at night. When we talk about the girl who drowned in the reservoir on the edge…

  To begin a new relationship with an old lover, is precisely that; new. How you cannot drink from the same river. Changing ways. Therapy and the co-pay. And so…

  I tell my student surgeons are more likely to be sociopaths, full of themselves enough to make a wound, then declare it healed. A sociopath’s paper bag personality is…

  for going upside my head with the seared black on both sides sound of your voice that night I got high off you with a mythological kind of white…

  Together we translate our mornings into coffee and the crossword, each with her own cup, each her own copy, the ritual habitual, afternoons into separate rooms, you pondering interstellar…

  From the patio of the architect’s favorite bar, you watch the city spiral out—a black net of chain-link fence, three crew cut soccer fields, the gray vein of West…

  My friend pronounced, like a man without a past, that the images were real. It was only on certain days, when the light hit the kitchen counter—the flowers, the…

  Even in the memories of the longest-lived whales, the ocean has never been quieter; this virus cuts a silent wake. Deep in their earwax, the dank white of baleen,…

  When did you last hug your mother? A. Before she spoke and I yelled. The word spun from my mouth +++like a screwball. B. When the stitches of the…

  the boy reminds me that he is not, in fact, my son. Too late now. We’re way into a country road & I’m carrying him against my chest like…