SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
i can barely speak in my mother tongues stutter
my accent is bad
i hate jalebi
but i like aloo samosa
i'm a bad brown
girl i didn't join the
SAA or the ISA
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps
when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.
O God, he said. O God.
the animal in me
is constant.
thirst starts,
hunger answers.
sleep is uncertain,
restless limbs.
in the night,
I hear footsteps.
We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war
We were doing so well
So well we got sleepy
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, an any boy of love
If I am judged
If I am punished
If I am dismissed
If I am misunderstood
If I am celebrated
If I am envied
If I am competed with
If I am slandered against
If I am seen
before i start i want to say you shouldn’t blame yourself
there’s no point in beating around the bush
there’s something we need to talk about
this is the most difficult thing i’ve ever had to tell anyone
i twist and gasp
open and close my mouth
searching for air
whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river
i know
the feel of strange hands touching my body
the struggle
I threw away your letters.
Years ago, just like that.
The tight black swirls,
circles and strokes
filling fine sheets —
I would not see them again.
The last items I had left.
You’d have to pay us
Could you pay us enough
To live for a stretch
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl
sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.
She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand
The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June.
180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil
…
But I do come to Trillium. To the Cardiac Short Stay Unit where you’ve been sent for the second stent, where free sanitizer prevents the spread of panic.
Your best friend falls in love
and her brain turns to water.
You can watch her lips move,
side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James,
who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
When I began to write, I didn’t know
each of my words would bit by bit remove
things from the world and in return leave blank
— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —
& the shadow kept arriving in segments,
cold currents pushed minerals
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.”
Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand,
1
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
How great unto the living seem the dead!
How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;
How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread
Escape me?
Never —
Beloved!
What is he buzzing in my ears?
“Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”
Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
