Poetry – Page 14 – swamp pink

Or

“the heraldic color gold” – The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary To love and to cherish, to have and to hold. Orsomething about the weather. The common cold. Or argent: a moon-white field, flapping. You’re in the clearas soon as you surrender. Do as you’re told—or what? How can we talk about sex when we can’t...

Weather Man

A landline connected your handsto the sky. You ordered upthe thickest snow we’d seen this far eastof the Mississippi. You kept receiptsfor sunshine, so my sister and Icould bathe in spring. I wanted your seasons to follow us southto the hot, dry house, the patchy grassin the yard. Each year you bloomedtrees for my mother,...

A Watershed is a Drainage System

Something more desperate than steampeels off the tarmac. Dallas is flat as we fly in. The Trinity is drying more every yearsince I left this place. There’s news of a conservation project I cannot seefrom my seat in the sky. Years back, boys I used to know in the beds of pickup truckscaught four-foot alligator...

Weighted Hair

I take my hair down / it doesn’t fall / It’s stubborn like that / insisting to praise the heavens / Every coil spiraled every which way / but down / With enough heat / I pressure it into submission / It used to be / witchcraft of chemicals and creams / hocus-pocusing one week...

Girl Accepts Forgiveness

February 27, 2023

Even then, we were blessedto endure a sufferingso Christ-like our enemyhad to shape-shift Godinto their likenesselse all the stolen languagewould be fodder for tricksters,our entrails honey for their breadin warm baskets of forgettingsince our Lord so easilygives us what we want.

Pink

February 27, 2023

I want to wield the loud click of heels every day. I hate the way my pain keeps  me from being as pink as a pickled egg, as feminine as dragon fruit skin.  Since learning it is not a prize  to be unlike other girls, I’ve wanted to wear ribbons on all my socks.  To get through another gray day I take  pills...

What We Have to Ask Permission For

February 27, 2023

What it means when the holes of pantyhose sprout spiderlegs. What it means to be a girl with billowing brows. What it means to ask a father to cut the hair from your own body. The line that portions which parts of your body are yours. What changes can you make: flip a hair part, do not dye it; ...

The Day Before Genocide

February 27, 2023

The living room shrinks to the slanting autumn daylight/ a Bollywood musical rolls through the hills at the lowest volume/ the lovers presumably kiss behind the rosebush on the screen/ love, a trimmed scene/ they’re breeding like rats a balding man screams at my teacup from the front page of the daily/ the chicken sits...

Centerfolds

February 23, 2023

I. Sexy in a sapphire one-shoulder gown, Abigail’s implantsbuzz from boom mics. For the first deaf contestant, Bachelor Matt spits his S’s, mouths his words wide, awards her the first impressionrose for being vulnerable, for being a fighter. Six episodes slip by with Matt’s hands in other women’s back pockets, with spot-litkisses in bright carnivals,...

In the National Register of Citizens

February 21, 2023

Hard People

February 6, 2023

for Alex Simand Watching old Soviet animations as a sort of secondhand nostalgia, our languages meld into a makeshift one. With cartoonish accent. Not the one our parents have, which we can’t actually imitate, or the one we shift into when we get drink-slurry or pissed off. Closer to the one we hear people put...

Route 1

January 30, 2023

When you ask what I’d do if I woke up tomorrow & didn’t have to worry over money, I tell you the truth. Commission a clamshell-shaped bed that snaps shuts on command, then close out my filial piety—tickets to St. Pete for mama, a team of attentive doctors for papa—& the tab where I searched,...