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Que Todo Lo Invade
We have spent fourteen days in the new apartment. During the evenings, my mother stands at the kitchen counter and cuts packing tape with safety scissors. She empties boxes and begins cataloging her...
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Some emotions, more thoughts, and many, many questions
I’m learning to read Japanese; each step across the page slides cleanly through me, sun cutting across the undergrowth. The characters fill me to the brim with the sticky reminder of their shape and...
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Adultlike
I am traveling. On the second floor of a train, knees pressed to my chest; I have not slept in two days, my mind is a terrible place. The trees are barely visible in the swollen dark, but thin branches...
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Unedited Excerpts of the Very, Very Bad Novel I Wrote in November 2012
PAGE 69 It is a landscape of a song: greens and yellows, lulls like hillsides, crags and cliffs as notes strike and shiver, the sun in the mouth of a singer that would foretell their deaths. They...
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Not A Good Day
A pair of young women came to calligraphy class today. They stood up to introduce themselves: slender, rounded arms, soft sweaters, pleasant voices. We practiced writing earth: pronounced chi, thick...
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HOROSCOPE PREDICTIONS FOR THIS MONTH
ARIES, TURN FERAL: You’ll be more domestic animal than humanoid; oily blood and salt fish will be more yours than maple sugar and liquid sunsets. You don’t just break hearts, you eat them. Everyone...
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Where I Am Now
My favorite days are like earth after rain, rich with soft soil smell, a little warm, a little damp. I make tea but forget to drink it, and the smell of it, heavy and sweet, fills the room. I spent a...
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雨降って地固まる
There’s honey in her hair, and, on the corner 0f her mouth, sea salt. She stretches like a tiger, when she wakes in the mornings. Her smile is a knife, bitter and tragic; her smile is a slab of butter,...
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Cut your hair
I examine my body in mirrors. In a year’s time, my hair has grown longer than it’s ever been; near the ends it feels like old hay, thick and unhealthy. I run my hands through it and think: this is...
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Eulogy for this body
I’m in Romulus, Michigan’s cheapest hotel, sitting cross-legged on a queen-size bed in a too-small tank top and old underwear. It’s my last night in America. The past eight months have been forming a...
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After the poison, before the antidote
I am this bad summer, slung sticky, and red-hot, across the new artificial grass framing the iceberg blue pool; I am the pink moon, hanging so heavy, as though close to splitting open, ripe; I make you...
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SALT DIARY
Your eyes are ink; I write in black iris. Your hands are flowers; I write on black iris. There’s a nest of swallows under the eaves (Spanish: golondrina, wings spread thin as leaves, cleaved from the...
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Eve
She names herself each time. She is Sphinx, once; her back to the door and a knife between her pink breasts. She is Rose, once; at the bottom of the lake, arms a circle around her head, blossoms in her...
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Vivid, luminous, and clear
Cymbals and then a green gong, and lama’s voice at the end of each verse is low and full; his is the sound a mountain would make, if mountains sang. The day after, at lunch, I tell him how nice it was...
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Fine & Crude
During the ceremony of Mahākāla, Lama spreads his fingers slowly and makes a circular motion with his hands, finishing the movement by resting the pads of his thumbs against his forefingers. I’m...
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Laundry List
This is my sense of self-worth. A dog in the wintertime, skinny, sitting squat on the side of a country road. A dog, alone, cold, still and wide-eyed as the snow comes down. This is my pride. An...
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Sonnets for the Woman Undergoing Surgery to Become a Human Weapon
SONNET I PRE-SURGERY These elements exist to complement, and you to choose your life in this. That farmer of atoms with shells like onion skin stands along the soil of your body on the gurney. Your...
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WHAT KIND OF PERSON
What kind of atom string, wrapped around what kind of carbon core, what kind of beating brain and nebulous heart, what kind of moral code, what kind of mantelpiece photograph, what kind of flower in...
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Walls, water; Rib, eyes
You are not the cooking pot in the yellow linoleum kitchen. You are not the carp, not the bowl, not the honeydew, not the tortoiseshell comb. You are not the phone pressed to the ear, not the slowly...
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Big Mermaid
It’s easy to get lost in these worlds, where the waters begin and end, and the shore is a thin layer of gold, sinking where my feet are, like the mattress dipping under your weight. If they made boats...
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