Colonies popped out of empire like mushrooms Coral reefs thinned out their amenities, the entire pluck Could be removed en masse for complete evaluation Daughter landed wrong at the bottom…
grief (disarmament) You’re a terrible witness. Wore stage outfits to testimony and upon returning home in search of his remains, you were really hunting down his flesh of guns. There…
after “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” by Hortense Spillers Stepping into the painting, backing up a moment to its edge, any further we’d fall out of the picture, we…
“Catalpa 29th August 2014,” a unique cyanotype triptych by Tom Fels © The artist. Courtesy Atlas Gallery, London drought Deer raise their ears, as he steps on gravel, then lower…
The apocalyptic reports have come true, dilute in our arterial solvent the atrocities saturate our latent notebooks we stay awake lambent there are iridium rectangles under our tables we meet…
It happened sometimes you asked me To play with you or differentiate Between black birds or help find Three things wrong and I said no Grackles sing like old springs…
vesey on the eve Maybe he should have split every tongue among his fellow Israelites whether they swore on their souls or not. Or gone it alone, based on the…
Then your curiosity returns to you Just a little wet with tears I welcome it home since I’ve been wondering— At evening—what is violet saying?— It speaks to the part…
The October leaves coming down, as if called. Morning fog through the wild rye beyond the train tracks. A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family…
self-care Have you tried rose hydrosol? Smoky quartz in a steel bottle of glacial water? Tincture drawn from the stamens of daylilies grown on the western sides of two-story homes?…
each letter Everyone crowded in that movie theater you found a seat to my left some thirty years later saying little, facing the screen while I use my hair to…
In the 2015 Korean film The Throne, the rice chest sits in the center of the vast, symmetrical courtyard of Changgyeonggung Palace. The film is called The Throne in English;…
What a lot of little music can do? The blind farmer Daylights in his cabbage row, going crouched down between leafy skulls, knows. He rises indifferent, far-gazing as a fine…
“you certainly have the right to your thoughts in this minefield” All that’s dammed-up in your head, hammered by the whitewater current of your knowing better— the daily small…
1960s newspaper clippings and teeth hang on a string—Like a book of life I’m in the kitchen with my killer Picking all the teeth out of a mouth harp Cigarette-ing…
Left to our use are the fixtures and appliances Repented of by the homeowners Who don’t realize this is a way to know them. In the basement one is closer…
The prepositions you’re most likely to encounter after the title of a poem are “for” or “to” and sometimes “after”—“for my daughter”; “to Bobby”; “after Pound”; etc. They signify dedication,…
Tongo Eisen-Martin’s poems are echo chambers of vernaculars and unofficial languages. He both registers the damage caused by systemic racism and evinces—and by his work extends—the rich modes of resistance…