we backup vocalists

shake the asphalt

top flight harmonies

sounds just like a baby

sighing in his sleep

our connection
Over Whatsapp is spotty as the internet is eaten by sharks

the steam and gas locomotives still
Hiss as if they’re remembered

I remember on the bus there is a word for a feeling

most of my friends never 
met their fathers.

I ask. 

My words, dripping with fleeting hope, like honey from a baby’s chin.

for leave of soft

ignorance, and inescapable

rhythm

Gaps between sounds deadened and dressed like a deer
one day from rot.

My people be water people so long
they grew gills

vaseline more high-top fade 

more pomade pressed

i wish to be burnt alive
by what i love.

My mother still beads adhans into a rosary at the minaret

The wavelength of red.
The lineage of honeycrisp

Summer in the 90’s meant the word schizophrenia did not exist inside my mother

float inside you, fondle your hear

the sand squishes up between 

my toes like brown sugar

I remember that Halmoni was the first person to call me a bitch.

It is the aperture that we cling to,
an exit that implies a return.

you laugh about buying
duck eggs from the farmstand

Billions of snakes

deep throating themselves into oblivion.

Mountains can block clouds, peak so high rain can’t climb them

fat red flowers, tomato toast

Imagine my gender

did not belong to the highest bidder.

she squints, pausing only to wipe the sheen from her black brow

she birthed me- her first son, laying in a cot under a leaking roof

my mouth is a boat

flooded with green tea

My mother matches her beauty mark with her kumkuma

A tearful Darlene asks, “Why do they hate us?”

ghosts know it like

they know my name

a selkie diving again and again

into the Irish sea

“We have time,” I say. “That’s just the warning bell.

unless you have a toddler
in which case you do at least three times

a big box of squeeze and buttons and squeaky noises

There are words in the English language that are especially beautiful

breathless beneath blue & purple

and we swarm it like flies / windows

milk, streaming from my open lip

Step by step, the cobblestones

remind me to stay sober.

‎f‏‏‎at,

burping tenor runs

during torah reading, we played lion king/

Thick with dice
or loose with change

the breeze tasted like
a chain-link fence

like a verdant archipelago

The wavelength of red.
The lineage of honeycrisp

Matte Meyer lemon, dimple-skinned orange
Bulbous

silver marching, a promenade of paper plates.

The psychic tells me I’ve lived

many lives on many planets.

cloistered landing in walled reserves

the anxiety of moments
that chased us here

every hue of green reminds me/like placid drop of memory

All those years

of trouble and toil

broken toys, syllables of a harvest moon

A place

to hold a thought

a raid on our tongue tips,
dipping in the honey taste of…

She said: take your curse, digest your sorrow, own your misery

I love them, their blue stickish torsos and jaunty meanderings

You will raise the spray to the sky, beloved, beautiful.

I run from the wound causing

mayhem along the causeway of my mind

a hole in the mattress

deep as I’d dug it

These wounds will bubble over
and grow, running in the streets
consuming. Everything.

I used to think a green room was where jealous people went

            her mother asked…

“does he smell arab?”

We’ve been there

the silence of reeds

all around us

The scientist felt a pronounced need for something whole that used to be green

it is humans who nurture flowers with blade hands

pitted, laying long like a twig. And I think of God, of all things

She was only skin and bone,
and could not even swallow rice porridge

A crow breaks from the oak
canopy

“pay attention! look about!
all this precious plenitude
is headed for the drain.”

can I too,
reach out,
and accept
all I need to live?

we will not
see when morning
sun melts it.

I had an imaginary friend: a giraffe named Lulu.

His history is whispered, and all identify him for his complexion.

The oranges have gone a bit soft, the apples are delicately

low hum
door slam
clickclack
nothing.

When you wake there are harsh syllables to grab at you, yell, threaten!

suspended on a spider’s web

we were to write a code-word, something easy to remember

save yourself, move
to the margins, just
leave the screen

after swallowing exclamation points
that might have made life better.

I don’t mind, sitting here, watching my younglings grow

toes dipped in cool water,
my hair wisping in the breeze.

crushed by squirrels running
after each other’s tails round and round

vigorous, the electric bulge beats
against the screen, wings intent

The sun is nice today. Soothing rays, raspy cartwheels whisker

Her fortune read, “You will travel to many exotic places,”…

We looked for ourselves in jazz clubs planted in unfinished basements

The space between raindrops
Is where I reside

suddenly, solid as a second chance,
asking me to unseal his sand art kit.

To their ears it’s a nuisance, but to mine, it’s a comfort

So I shall arise
And return
To my mother’s house.
Unrepentant.

I am my own tapeworm, stuck inside myself.

elongated shadows on the periphery of sunset panoramas, anonymous

every day break the sludge:
caffeine, wine, rapping

Side by side we contemplate
Until, moldering unashamed,
We are carried away.

He struggled to compose himself,
while I watched. Some things
never change.

You didn’t plan on icy rain
touching your skin so unpleasantly.
So rudely, really.

Split me open til the alphabet soup spilled out

Mouth wide, bloody and pleading, palms extended, my need is ugly and unrelenting.

I got the news today
My V.A. claim denied.

Suppose I said the words “dinner time” and I wrote the words “chicken piccata”

The mint and spice scent
of my grandfather’s pipe tobacco,
once lost

Burning bright, making heat, it makes sense now

After retirement, the years become a blur

flesh of
fruit
soft but
un ripe

Tell me who you are.

I still remember the day I sat on a padded bench among other women

After we younglings in choir loft intone our last song, we close our hymnals…

I cried for nothing last night.

Soft is hard to come by.

The poem is a hot-air balloon.