The Scaffold’s Branch
I, Your mirror, lie in shards. When the color left my cheeks, You left too.
for Majnoon
—after the 1976 Hindi film Laila Majnu Death is not so cruel. Does the nightingale not see the bleeding rose, how she tears her collar, her very…
A Robe of this World
Look! God descends+++ like fog upon the city, +clouding mirror, horizon— +offering little more than the illusion +of dream. ++++The parched ++hold their tongues +++to the air, ++++heavy with…
The coming of spring
—after Faiz He found in the leaves a mixture of dread and shaking hands. He smiled just once before death. The lake flowed in the wind like…
Spring in the Suburbs
is a revolution long in the planning, crocuses rising up despite the night’s last frost, their conviction enflaming the wide lawns green with reckless youth. Now, everywhere,…
Sonetto: A Red Red Rose
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so —Sonnet 54, Shakespeare Bees are dying in swarms and soon the flowers. What is a sonnet without a red red…
Archipelago
after the Islands of Chagos para mi Carlos Arturo After Tuvalu, did we really try hard enough? One, two degrees, chronicles of floods. Still around us are deniers…
The Warming
A blizzard wraps me in white shapes, white lies. Uprooted too soon, I seek omen in a bed of white earth. My mother once said, Go and find…
The Bone Saw Speaks
By the time they plugged me in— electricity enlivening me the way God courses through the socket two bodies make— the man was already dead and did not know…
One Day, My Body
I’m tethered since the man on the ridge, limited to the path between the backyards and the cemetery. This body is a rope that swings me over…
Body Horror
To keep them trapped, the doomed office workers’ heads are rigged to explode. It makes sense in that movie-logic way— bombs masquerading as trackers, some vague lie about…
Dear Burglar,
You must have thought I was a junkie. Syringes everywhere. Upturned biohazard box. My bed, thanks to you, a graveyard of blunted needles. This is the second time you’ve…