I’m the most cowboy folk I know out of Durango boots, absent faded- bronze Ariat hat (1). I feel myself best as FL4K (2), the non-binary automatonic star of the loot-&-shoot galaxy. They command creatures of the waste lands, a glimmer of unforgiveness in their
1. Dead Mike from CB4 standing in front of a liberation flag with raised fist, wearing an Ankara cap whilst rapping, “I’M BLACK Y’ALL. AND I’M BLACK Y’ALL. AND I’M BLACKER THAN BLACK, AND I’M BLACK Y’ALL.” 2. Titus Andronicus shrugging his shoulders and saying,
RIP the 163 orcas who have died in captivity at marine parks. No one knows what plays in the mind’s dark theater, when ropeshold you afloat at the end. What song-worm hums a motionless whale body: mating trills, eager tenor of takeaway ships, or mother’s cries because mothers cry like animals
i.Palm trees stand at attention againstthe haze-filtered sky perfectly blackened in purple. On a screen I hold in the palm of my hands, I watch the palmsin my sister’s city bow humbly to Irma’s force. I nurse a glass of wine as she savors
stillness is a blessing. the quiet rests & unrests. pleasure muses in sunlight & sometimes raindrops. laughter bends & stretches. a bird, a wind chime. dancing heals the soul. i’ve never cried, never danced. so much beauty in sorrow. it’s hard to breathe without breaking
We should call it Gay Beachagain, like they did in the seventieswhen your mother spent summers selling sandwiches from a cooler. Hiland Dale’s made tuna for sun-kissed men kissing men who poured out of The Friendship into daylighthungry and drunk. Ducked belowthe echoing underpass lit
When you said just chop a clove of garlic and swallow it like a pill in response to my bronchitis, it wasn’t about bootstraps and pulling at them or mistrusting the doctors even though you did mistrust them. It was about that oasis each of us must find
I used to cut cucumbers with the green knife and now I use it to dig into the cardboard box—layer of foam. Layer of plastic. The table: four legs and a flat square top. I’m tired and made of knees. All week I’ve been having
the story begins and ends with marriage,or a lack of marriage, which turns into a confession. you confessthere is a gun, hidden in the dirt and grass and no one really remembers it anymore,but everyone can remember a job well done. a father and his
who would do anything for their country if they didn’t first love someone in it sixth grade, I’m scaling a fence with the other immigrant kids, all of us raised on gratitude for a country that doesn’t want us the school’s on lockdown but we’re