Who called Mirrellez C. Elliott and told her that her son had died in police custody? How many minutes did it take for the police to drive De’Sohn from where he was arrested in New Haven to the police station at One Union Avenue?

For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me, like you sort of hope there is when you're a teenager.

Mom says a white deer means blood is coming. When I sleep, the forest floor is a lake of red, no matter if the deer are white or brown. A gunshot sounds.

By the base of his steps, there was a flower pot with a sad, half-dead plant. She lifted the thing. Felt the small force of its weight against her. Stupid, she knew. But she was a container brimming over. And she needed to let something go.

I asked Grandpa how he got the silver medal he’s so proud of, and he said he got it for shooting a Northern Viet bastard right in the face. He said the…

I am the woman who the writer could not earn enough money to see. He never finished the stories, nor the political articles. He never arrived on the train, we never stayed at the hotel. We were dating at a time when I hated the idea of old age. In other words, I was happy.

Mazin, our first, arrives in 92. He comes out at three and a half kilograms, which the doctor tells me is normal.

But in another language, in my father’s mouth, there is a tenderness to the tone he takes, so that the word beat overlaps with other words, some of them meaning I miss you. He says beat as if the word shares a border with laughter. As if it is just a lost synonym for love.

and the tour guide said what a shame how awful the heroin in Kensington but we would not be focusing on that today because this was an African American Iconic Hero tour and she smiled beatifically at the Black couple and the Black couple only...

It’s approaching midnight and this is not how I would have wanted it to happen: sitting by myself on my porch, drinking wine from the bag of a box and chain-smoking cigarettes...

The logical conclusion of Despentes’ argument that femininity is equivalent to the art of servility is that a society of women made to worship femininity would have the most servile women. This may be why my American friends are horrified when I confirm the supreme reign of Miss Venezuela.

The plastic surgeon, a short, blond-gray mustachioed man comes in to tell me he’s headed to the OR and will see me in there. He taps the rail of my bed twice, a gesture I take as doctorly affection, and turns to leave the room. I call after him, “Just remember—think small—like, real small. Like, just get rid of ‘em!” Dr. Haynes reminds me that this breast reduction is not cosmetic surgery.

Janet was ten when our town turned to poultry. Layers and broilers at first, but there was no profit in eggs and soon it was all just pluck and slaughter. She stood alongside line workers, barefoot in buckets of warm water to keep frostbite away.

I’m writing a book about fires. Metaphorical and literal. About the way human relationships spontaneously combust. How a self crashes and burns.

Pain is uninteresting to everyone except the person who experiences it, and even then, the appeal wears off. I became bored by my own pain, afraid that I was becoming irrelevant, ceasing to exist. Who was I if I could not teach, could not parent, could not write? Pain makes a very poor companion, and rather enjoys maximizing presence so that no one and nothing else can occupy your time. I worried about Stockholm Syndrome: was I making nice with my pain or simply getting used to him?

            Recently, I was talking to my friend, Camas, at a party when the subject of our college admittance essays came up. I haven’t done a lot of…

how easy it is to erase rusting yellows? / how easy to let blues blue into zombi? / how easy / is ease?

Do we all migrare: pass into a new condition? / Are we all natives—nativus: born in bondage— / walking toward no-border?

Reading my grandfather’s notebooks, I’m trying to / know madness as a way of searching.

"I am thinking that a poem could go on forever."—Jack Spicer Tell me the story of the night I was born. Mother's palm on her laboring back, shopping…

Let us recognise “dad bod” as another / crystallization of sexism.

i open my hands & eat the bird inside the ball of light, the song of the bird of the devil burns a hole in my body & out of it a streak of feathers

The Adriatic Highway, a ligament that holds the tectonic states together / A transparent field of magnetic vessels swaddling a crumbling desert / nosing the star-map a clan of deer migrate West / Sultry doe-eyed creature of darkness revolving around the metallic pole as a planet around its star in heat.

She worked in a supermarket before Showing women the way to the leeks, soaking the mop, affixing stickers to the cheeks of apples

My sons are already / crawling, crawling / over the rug where / we used to lie / talking, talking / about our days / and day in the ab- / stract—

They continue to throw salmon shadows darkening the spectrum as it prisms into conditions, leaving a ruin of bleached coral in regret...

before their war, the Aqlla served / overflowing quinoa milk / to unworthy undeserving grins

something remains of our being / braided flesh and muscle / or we’re chilled / bags for bone.

In their entry on love, Berlant writes that we tend to (mistakenly) use the objects our desire attaches to in order to assume an identity— “you know who…

For Berlant, part of the problem of politics is that marginalized people have to accommodate the feelings of their majority counterparts in order to successfully…