What the Body Knows
How to flee / or at least how to want to / how to thrum with silent shame / secret iconoclast hacking a red grimace / through Thanksgiving dinner / with people who love you / what do they know / gorgeous table wrought in
Daily Archives: February 3, 2019
Mètis Breakfast
Pipe tobacco rolled in bank receipts Smoked smooth from dirt to peat With each sip of french pressed And honeyed coffee. My body Is a bog. I wanted to quit This winter. Two restless dogs Banjo and Fiddle jig their feet Even in sleep. Rising
The Sharks
This is desert now, desert country, red country. Some say you can taste the air, the change, a sort of bitterness, an indescribable flavour. I for one cannot. I see only the slowness of it all, the inevitability. Look. We stand against the wall in
Kuya
Kuya Edwin and I used to tear shit apart. We did it all the time because he’s my Kuya; my bigger, broad-shouldered, older brother who showed me how to survive while being brown in New Jersey. Edwin taught little me how to use my mind
Forgiveness Season
When the green Sierra figs have fully digested the tiny wasps that burrow in their backs through a pinched hole losing their wings on the way so all that’s left is to desiccate among the pink jammy acids. A season for telling our preteens that
Baby Face
The woman evaluating my honesty at the liquor store looks at my face as it was five years ago and then at the face I am wearing now and then at the small plastic rectangle in her hands and she examines the date written upon
Mara, Mermaid
In the early morning before fully waking, Mara imagined Miguel, who was one of her mother’s housemates, forcing her to sit on the kitchen stool in her skirt but without any underwear. She held out her small pointy breasts to him, as he reached his
A Seat at the Trickster’s Table
I arrived hungry to the feast invitation clutched in hand, but something seems off— there are only tricksters around this table. I can’t look too closely at the center offering in case I recognize the face. It’s a well-kept secret but even the most respectable
I Can Hear You
Poem for the dead I can hear the stream, the generator shutting off, and the white dogs barking. I can hear my footsteps on the dirt road shaded from moonlight by the tended forest. I can hear fog sliding over the hilltops and pooling, lit
Why You Can’t Put a Wheelchair on the Stage
Conceived by Rani Deighe Crowe with Jill Summerville * Monologues from Macbeth and Henry VI by William Shakespeare ** Dialogue from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare Additional references to A Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, Noises Off by Michael Frayn, and the musical Chicago