Poetry

Keywords: g-house, booty house, juke, percolator, bang-bang-bang, skeet-skeet-skeet

We are all enchanted. But we have to pay for it.

You know that part of town where the miners once lived? Sooty frame houses, porches whose floorboards spring up? Rusty screen doors that close with a thrum, then a series of clicks, then a...

ten mexicans are dead, left to suffocate in a trailer, discovered after the driver asked someone for a drink of water.

Walking into the smell of old wounds, something about my grandmother’s
bedroom always kept me from there—the perfume
once animal golden now rancid & dark as whiskey. Lace-
medallioned, doilies marking time turned to loss

Crooked red fingers of stretchmark on her hips, dough Isabel kneads back into hips, magnolias in her hair, blossoming hips

For a genealogy assignment I took a blood test. I found out I am O positive. My mom is A negative, which seems very fitting. My dad is B positive. This alone would normally frighten me. Needles should freeze in hell. I told my dad I was...

When he traveled, he did so without mercy, in a body that was not a body but canvas painted with his handprints.

I imagined us a nation
because our house
was our corner of the world.

At the spot where the girl lay, I see the refineries. Their stencils are blurred on the horizon, making their machinery less intricate, & therefore, holy.

I’m tired of being a woman. I walk
into grocery stores and laundromats wet
with the cracked face of a maidenhead
lurching across the Atlantic.