All the dictionary is erased— palimpset
pulpy remembering
You are not a title page
not the index of your skin you are the falling autumn
already buried by the snow.
After carrying the weight of all this damage for over thirty years, I wanted to be rid of it. And not just the smell of it—all of it. To remove it from my body like a malignant growth or parasite. To deposit it in into something: a jar, a forgotten account, someone else’s body. To throw the shame away. Into the trash. Into the ocean. Into a fire. To archive the pain like slave schedules or census records that no longer spoke of my existence. This poem is a scar that reveals the …
This poem contains lines in Yiddish, with rough translations before and phonetic translations after. i. I just had the weirdest dream: We were strangers in the land of egypt. Fremde zenen mir geven in land mitsrayim Hemmed lines in our hands gave way to mime and we mouthed a thousand languages – babel’s tatters gestured at our calloused feet. Each brick was a tongue, Yeder tsigl iz geven a tsung. Friends at seder gummed their tile song, made mortar in their mouths to pave paths between wayward tribes. ii. I just had the weirdest dream. Our tonsils were the sand of the Sinai and our lungs were made of dust un undzere lungen zenen geven fun shtoyb; we wetted tongues with wine to mend our voices delirious for want of water. The blessings that we coughed Di brokhes vos mir flegn hustn Dust-ridden and bronchitis-stricken pleaded with the sky for deliverance in Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish and Bukhari.…
On a sweltering Tuesday, me and Dylan pack into my beat up minivan and bump our stereo damn near to its limits, pushing out Lupe…
Hailstorm We sat on the front porch early that morning, right as the sun should’ve risen, listening to ping-pong balls of hail pound against the…
Habitat: Thinks of somewhere she isn’t— if it’s Alaska, yearns for Spain or Texas; If it’s Cuba, wishes herself on the subway headed to the…
My father, Buck, was a quick-tempered, mean son of a bitch who, at age 53, shot and killed a man in a bar back home…
I found the creature in the middle of my lawn on the day that Ellie came home. I had no idea what type of animal…
One afternoon near the end, before the move, we walk the green by the mall and stop at the water wall, ever-raining monolith amid the…
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