while naked eyes ++++++++++fearlessly       stared directly *       at the smallest part ++++++++++of a partial eclipse * beholden ++++++++++to an obscuring      …

  how does the test subject make sense of what being Zulu means to them? how would Pavlov hypothesize their classical moulding? how would Skinner proceed to diagnose their operant…

  We’re sitting here arguing about the meaning of bailed as opposed to the fact that you did it +++bailed : provided security for inmate release, as if New York…

Dawson Springs, Kentucky; December 10, 2021; EF-4 Tornado * hill street lumber street the nortonville road all that yonder by the school that store off of union where we stopped…

  Outside, bright leaves batter the window screens. Here, you are a warm weight pinning me to now. We will never be cleaner to each other. You have yet to…

  My father-in-law’s hand-painted sign, locked inside, says, Eat As If You Are In China. Color photos of 1980s patrons line the walls, turn sepia. The Yum Yum on Race…

  A man at the bus stop lugs +++his cello with such vigour it scares me. +++Unlike him, I’m estranged from my music. The evening makes song from the hollow…

  for my mother They don’t expect me here, in Paris. It is November and the trees are full of smoke, my conscious mind assimilating the last lyric from an…

  Is such an interesting word. First because it imitates an animal sound, which is already oddly loaded. Then because the animal is a goat, and not a dog or…

  Subject to general monumentality in the air, the waters of the sultanate-era royal tank too, spoke of solidity and stillness, plastered in a layer of green algae that stuck…

  Let not branch, fruit, and gnarled trunk deceive you—a tree is a machine. A chemist, too, whose shiny leaves skulk toward sun and translate its mien into matter. A…

  +++The first time someone told me             please speak English I had to code switch so fast    my languages failed me and I said nothing +++For a long…