Poetry

Missing Crooked

For so long, I’ve scoured
thumbprints on maps, empty

corridors, boats in harbor, constellations
that refuse to navigate. Thick with shrapnel

and gutted like a shoe
without laces, I stumble, call for you

FREEDOM

I am harboring guilt over the hundreds & hundreds
of Pokémon trapped inside of their Poke balls trapped

inside of my phone. I want to say something important
like “Pokémon is capitalism” or “Pokémon is imperialism”

or—worse—“Pokémon is slavery,” but what do I know,
what can I know. History is a box. I am looking inside.

Two Poems

The god flood comes, beloved—hold my eyes
on your eyes, within your eyes—hold
my limbs as they wooden, build up
a soft mist, rippling pools, thick vines
to spool my low cries as my lungs evolve

The Farmer on Strike

It wasn’t always grapes. Sometimes he’d been growing strawberries,
and he knew you liked jam so he’d make his own. You never told him,
but once or twice you crept round there, watched him standing at the stove
through the fog of your breath on the glass.

in the language of flowers

all your summertimes reprised in G major, everybody dying backwards in Technicolor just for you. aren’t you just so lucky? how the flowers never remember what did or didn’t happen above the staircase that day. though in the language of flowers, the only word that rhymes with sister is slaughter: their pollen flushed faces turning toward sunnier and sunnier slaughterhouses.