My father’s childhood home was condemned a few years before. Looking at the simple house, above us on the slight hill, I wanted to enter, except my tía stopped…

  I find disappointment in the Midwest—how they keep wanting me to be Mothman. We both wear red eyes and wings, but I take no joy in knocking down bridges…

  Inside the mask, hot with my own breath and the toxic smell of cheap rubber, I look through eye-holes into the mirror and see a predictably demented clown.  …

  I get it. There is nothing inherently creepy about an empty swing swinging on an abandoned playground. But the ghost pushing it is a problem. You remind of my…

  The quiet page is drenched but the snow keeps filling it up your fountain pen loops are the tangles you couldn’t comb out of your daughter’s hair when you…

  —after Zhang Zao   A letter opens and time turns back a letter opens and a wound appears a letter opens with an apology and closes with an exclamation…

  you were born between having & not having: in a cream-tone house   with orange trimming, bombs hang on either side of your country   like parentheses. there are…

  Standing and staring out into the murky spaces of night where the bushes lose themselves to obscurity, a scintillation occurs, a happenstance, a brief blinking, off/on, as in: non-being/being.…

  which in this country means just gone two, a speckled black and white cat creeping under a hedge, the sun an orange foil over high rooftops, lawn damp and…

  I am the parasol through which she enters this world and if I were to rid myself   of her, pull her from me like a layer of skin,…

  Bells. Then silence and trembling. Touching a photograph, I count the dead. The furnace rumbles.   Candles flare. There’s no card from my mother to stand with the others…

  I make supplications to the birds whose feathers were blades, lost in war. birds whose bones could no longer be found in the museum, because they flew over the…