Poetry
Meditation during the Sufferings and Deaths of Others
I did not deserve to be beaten, and I did not deserve ballet lessons– except insofar as everyone deserves ballet lessons. Me mum thought I was well worth beating. She would not have thought that I deserved to starve. I deserved the milk in her breasts–I had put it there. When I was a baby, …
sonic icons
I if I say duvet, night, bed you’ll expect you heard sleep if I say raw, China, worm you’ll think silk and if I say I love you, I love you, I love you hear eye olive yew
How to Survive a Pandemic
the plague comes, the plague grows we stop going outside and call it social responsibility as if we need a reason not to see each other as if we’re not already only seeing each other through the pixels of a screen glued to it like babes on a tit or drunks at the bottle is …
This Town I Knew
I hear the women in the bus swaying, heavy as birds I hear their breathing widening in concentric circles I hear the ice in the souls of men collapsing onto the children I hear the sirens of the silent train and the slobbering Alsatians sniffng the air for faults, unkind fires in their eyes I …
children of omolokun
Lot’s Fall
I’ve kissed a black stone in the snow. Perhaps it was a black eye in the stone’s dream in the snow. Like a spot on the white tablet. I’ve kissed a black eye in the stone’s dream in the snow. Oblivion is yours, yours alone! No I didn’t turn back and there turned all that …
Posing Nude
after Living Room by Deana Lawson If I were to choose a man to pose nudewith, it would be the ex whose handin mine, I couldn’t distinguishfrom my own—just as, studyingthis photograph, it’s hard to tellthe male’s fingers, pressedinto a triangle, from the female’s,decorated by acrylic nails so longthey curve like a penis might. This …
This Is the Dream
In the sun, brown men glowas I hear the clop of their hammers;they nail new siding to a building, stapletar paper to a roof, whack weeds off the edge of a yard. Always these men of soiland gasoline bring me to my father,a different brown but brown. I picturehim standing with his friend like these …
Miniatures
My nightmares about betrayal have all come true, if possible, I would like to understand the nature of your room, I wish to place something inside the wardrobe closet. A small gift, as small as a jam jar of poison, as small as a loaded makeshift pistol that a toddler once used as a toy and resulted in many …