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Femicide

October 29, 2024
Resurrection, Joan Snyder you cannot wear a red dresswhen rape and murder have sewn itso must document it piece it intosequenced panels that recount violencedisproportionately wrought againstgirls and women with a didactic handyou must remand each newspaper storyto the custody of our view cut themto scraps paste them into collage thuslyto make a mosaic of...

Fairytale

October 29, 2024
En El Bosque, Lydia Panas in the woods I lost sight of youthat moment you were caughtin branches that must have tangledyour hair and sent you trippingover unseen roots thick undergrowthof the forest floor denying us passagein these woods without clearingor sunlight gathering I have beenseeking the way to lay my body downinside your shadow...

New York Presbyterian/Weill-Cornell Medical Center

October 29, 2024
One day, something happened:I saw the sound of blood. I was dreaming of you.I created you. I came out of my body and saw my body expand.I arrived for examination and saw my temporary living quarters:heaven. Immediately, everything can go wrong!(Even your teeth! In dreams, my teeth become soft.) I give birthto water, near-useless in...

One Way

October 29, 2024
Lately I am not the traveler, but all that isleft of the road. I swear I remember the heatof hands on my back, back before night airwas all. I promise soft breath on my neck moving like the body on my body was not only a reflectionof the moon on my centerline, the stars onmy...

What happens when a plant breathes
smoke?1

October 29, 2024
As napalm was falling from my grandfather’s plane, my auntwas lighting my mom on fire in New Mexico. My grandmother’shands, scarred instructions on how to put a baby out. My brotherused to burn lighter fluid off his palms to entertain neighbors.A flame’s always seeking attention. My fire makes a wick of every-thing. When gods gave...

what say ye to your bouquet cousins?2

October 29, 2024
Hello Pirate. Us Marauders miss you. Hard to be a thirsty bitch.There are so many boats parked in the sand. This is what wantdoes to us. Here is the vessel without the ocean. You’re the oceanwith no need for containment. Do you know a flower’s scent istheir way of screaming? Something is coming for our...

What do you feel in your body when you overplant a friend and it dies?3

October 29, 2024
Mother felt suffocated by the suffix -hood. Carbon Monoxidetook my friend, then my grandparents. Now I’m watchingCOPD slowly strangle my father. It’s funny how we under-value the unsayable. Air, what’s that? My birth sign triplelayered in Venus. The antique lace curtains of my childhoodare soot-stained at their hems—death is playful, touchingtoes, fingerprints warning: you should...

Midday Song

October 29, 2024
After failing my real-life bus schedule quiz, I hoofedthe first of three miles to work along cracked and risingsidewalks, other lives whizzing by only a few feetaway. I watched candy wrappers learn to fly and saw a baby bird in a tiny patch of grass that must’ve tumbledfrom a gutter-nest above. It was craning and...

First Poem for Dysphoria

October 29, 2024
after Phillip B. Williams Guess who? It is I, peering into the mirror,ever-expectant of some pleasantly unfamiliarnot-new, not-me me. Why does a third eyedot my forehead as though I were a screen,ever-portentous of some unpleasantly familiarradical dimension, new matter, new me? Guest etiquette: pink dress with flowers and meentering it, a wet curtain occludes the...

Stage Directions for Embrace

October 29, 2024
Your body is a stone at the bottom of a pool. Your mother a limbfallen atop the water. Evening approaches as the music begins: wood shakingand singing with the hair of the animals. Birds call from branches that have yet to fall.The music grows and grows. A dog cries, rushing toward the birds.Your body is...

Let’s Go*

October 29, 2024
I too like the nightlife baby     the sun downing over the curvature of my day    as twilight spreads outward into rooms where   makeup is laid out like ritual tools in a tomb     this is an afterlife from job & family   the constant gaze of people who clutch throats   or their children when I pass three...

Holy Land

October 29, 2024
In an Arabic class I wrote a poem        about an abyss I’d read about a man who fell        in a crevasse when my sister calls I fear her stalker a soldier        instead it’s news of the boy she likes and staying        up from iftar to suhoor listening to their favorite loves songs        the man I...