death

Here’s a lesson: If you leave a hole in the forest, / leave a mouth open in pain, astonishment or grief, / something will come to fill it

What’s the thin break / inescapable, a sudden thud / on the porch, a phone / vibrating with panic on the nightstand?

The house my mother grew up in burnt down in ’85. I hope y’all never experience something like that—losing everything, Mom told my brothers and me when we were too young to understand.

Koreatown, Los Angeles

Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.
I stared into her bespectacled eyes.

Ms. Brooks showed me how 
to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin