Results for tag: Poetry Tuesday
373 results found

January 2, 2024

i watch you watch the news, that a body/ prepared for burial is measured at the elbows, and/ worry.

December 5, 2023

So my father summoned my mother, my sister, my history professor, and my psychiatrist who demanded my weightless crown for their curiosities.

June 27, 2023

Walking in the predawn, syncopal / heat we revert to the guttural old / tongue.

May 30, 2023

In my right hand, a monsoon to rain the year away / In my left, a poem to wash yourself clean.

May 9, 2023

The estimate comes down to six hundred missing,/ the estimate comes to a son flying off a bridge.

February 7, 2023

Instead, eternal life / blossoms on the branches of a peach tree every three thousand years.

December 13, 2022

Once my eyes close, they watch / her calcium peeling piece by piece.

June 14, 2022

I have done it again, crossing / outside the frame into / some brave, new world

November 23, 2021

You’re sleeping so soundly it feels like a sin every time I move.

August 17, 2021

after 9/11 / cold silver stretches / across a slate gray table / a room tucked in an airport terminal / you’ve never heard of.

August 10, 2021

Today because you are a Cancer rising I want you / to try keeping my name in your mouth like a freeway-Slurpee / kiss, to feel my name burst against your body like / the airbag’s inflated plastic cushion while the car careens in / figure-8’s

July 27, 2021

I read the flora and fauna in my home as uncannily resilient. / My ancestors’ bodies were presciently small. / Nests accommodate the needs of infestation. / I simply could not live in this house alone.

July 20, 2021

in Chinese, pistachios are called / kaixinguo — happiness fruits. / but they are neither happy nor fruit. / they are birthed out of their shells / i am not happiness nor fruit nor mother; / only carefully extracted.

July 6, 2021

[we/ ] bombed them, because [ /they] bombed us.
a star falls on someone else’s city because it’s just a shooting star.

April 6, 2021

REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.

February 23, 2021

At the door, like a dog. / I waited for love. / The heart / was a station / where evenings stopped.

February 16, 2021

A golden teardrop in the making. The skin stretched pale and translucent, leaving the flesh to its own devices in an increasingly dangerous season. The fruit will not travel far.

February 2, 2021

stories that seethe in the blood: a lion / that slumbers in the copper pillar of her / body.

January 5, 2021

A girl labelled comfort / wartime ammunition / recalled her father who built / her home on / a graveyard

December 8, 2020

tell me you knew all along & you reached for / the heavens because you were happy.

December 1, 2020

Gas station glow past 3AM, the glassed look of a man who’s been sitting for too long, hot dogs slumbering behind a screen, their skins plump and pink.

November 3, 2020

I stow away the sentences in which there is no you in my drawer right after writing them I remember the time when I emptied the bottom of my drawer for you There I found stuff like a key that became useless forever

October 6, 2020

One day you’ll be married. May Allah make your naseeb good. May you find a man who prays and follows the deen.

September 29, 2020

somewhere a tiger loosens its throat or so she imagines / the rubber trees looming she lifts her paring knife to the day’s throat

September 1, 2020

Or Say: a piece of rope at the top of the stairs where shame broke even and shame blame and victim bad-name got it’s nasty plug.

August 25, 2020

Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?

July 14, 2020

everything is/air/is/argument (the chorus said)/as I slept/in the desert//
service on the cell went dead/I said/jocasta always hangs herself

June 30, 2020

At fifteen Nani shot a / tiger. A big gun in a girl’s hands; I’ve seen the picture.

June 2, 2020

When my harabeoji died / last spring I thought I’d move to California, convert / to Catholicism, kneel beside my halmeoni at early Mass // become student of those hundred and three / Korean saints though I can’t name more than one.

May 26, 2020

In our home we brewed ginseng tea to battle unnamed / diseases. We held hands with health. I was never good at it, of course: / always too bitter, oversteeped. Always the universe mocking me / from the sidelines.

May 5, 2020

Perhaps for you a minefield’s / just a field, for you a mother tongue / is not some rune that breaks your mouth / and heart.

February 11, 2020

When the children / correctly used their chopsticks to pick up the rolled eggs and / separated the kimchi without splinters, they knew they were / loved by their food. The ashes knew it too.

December 17, 2019

脱脂牛奶 …..………………. $1.00 / mama am i skeleton enough mama am i skeleton enough .………. 0.25 mile

September 3, 2019

& if / you find yourself full of holes, the / way they beat fish at the markets, / think of the hands, damp & cherried / with rain, that once tore your mother / out of the house / she learned to dance in.

August 27, 2019

I loved them all and everything / they thought about so much and I was out / of my mind by then, not with grief or disgust / but with beauty

August 6, 2019

we dog eating people / eating off each other / bear the vaguely dog / sounding name stairs

June 11, 2019

You can describe a place / without knowing it. / At recess in March I choked / because the air tasted like fertilizer. / What’s the difference / between breathing a place / and being suffocated by it?

June 4, 2019

I pulled the comforters out after. / You had sweat the bed; the room bloomed with / your sweetness. I thought / you can know / somebody for a long while and not know / their scent.

May 21, 2019

hong kong a neon neckline, long hair glittering / with ship-lights, crystal balls, storm velvets. / it’s her life, yet I had come, and grown / my hair, and happened upon the eastern sun / like a moon.

May 14, 2019

Now, I’m lost in the woods thinking of Noy. / Is she still in Seattle? Does she has her pastry shop? / In Minnesota, I gather what is gone, capturing a spirit.

April 23, 2019

Instinctively, one / wants to be the native plant in its ancestral loam, / one wants a resistance to the sun, to shun full rainfall / for a flash of morning dew, or at very least, grow / some throwaway limbs.

April 16, 2019

I practiced my Urdu in the bathroom with you / as I sat in the tub; only so long before an American / mermaid can stand without floating on into sea foam.

March 26, 2019

What do you like he tries again / and I think of landscape, the early fog / ridden hills of San Francisco when eucalyptus / unfurl like children waking to the light.

February 19, 2019

If you lie / on the table, you subject the table to a terrible guilt. / It is no longer a table people can eat on. If you stand / next to the table, the table senses its mortality.

February 12, 2019

Over and over / from some small / dark pit, / it spun out / a whole world / for itself

February 5, 2019

I am careful with my words unless they are not in English, / am I not? (不好意識打擾各位可是我不想再禮貌了。) / My mother is careful with her words only when they are in English.

January 15, 2019

My father the frycook, his father / the same. Their hands so oiled / everything they touched / flamed. Like Midas if Midas / loved fire not gold.

December 4, 2018

The / day you died, the windows of our house were / open to let the breeze in. You said that it was / nothing.

October 30, 2018

She’s here to see us off. / Her voice is the softest ligature, unthreading. / Why are you saying goodbye to everyone except for me who raised you?

October 12, 2018

May our dead no longer speak to us / Our language now kneaded into other woes / with rancid stars a meager pittance / and false kingdoms rich in violent blows

September 18, 2018

This is my small sphere. / I’ll make good, stay folded in myself. I promise / to memorize the bramble and texture of garden walls.

September 11, 2018

Fingers caked with wet / rice break backs and bellies, / pluck gills, / scrape eggs, tear limbs / Tita takes our legs– / cracks them / under a glass jar for us. / We suck shells ’til twilight.

August 7, 2018

Not all rainbow: here, tender orange, / there, rusted brown, the underside / gelatinous and white. Then the bones.

July 24, 2018

The stallion: one win short / of the triple crown. My intonation: / one stress too many for an apology— / all the times I got it wrong. Minoru, / Minoru—both are gone.

June 26, 2018

Ask if he knows, what the first champagne mango of the summer / tastes like, its golden juices flowing over some farmer’s / cigar paper skin.

June 19, 2018
Apo

A policeman found the boy minutes later. A shaman, / a monk, a priest, and a poet are still pouring over / his soul.

May 29, 2018

We prayed for resurrections, / but the dead remain as memories that / seemed to shrink in the mind, / like an airplane appearing smaller / the further it gets from the ground.

May 22, 2018

I should say kholo, my mother’s brother. / I should say umja, my father’s brother / so you know which branch of the tree to cut. Or / cherish.

May 8, 2018

Pipedream: / I wondered what it would be like to strip away / slit eyes—sick of assimilation; the debilitating / task of tireless reinvention.

January 30, 2018

Studio Era music makes me want to dress fancy and pretty; leave the house in gorgeous armor, but I know too well the earth’s hunger and I will not satisfy it. Today I leave my house and I make sure no one can call me faggot.

January 23, 2018

but really every word sounds like the sun/ sweltering in the middle of Santacruzan

November 7, 2017

‘A week before I graduate, I round up all my femme clothes / and stuff them in the Savers plastic bag / I’d gotten them in.’

October 31, 2017

‘Mine: thick & black, so coarse / when trimmed, the ends splintered / bare feet.’

September 26, 2017

‘As if I could get un-situated / this airport a bubble hovering / in a void between celestial bodies / in but not of / the country I stand in.’

September 19, 2017

showbiz etceteras · commercial spaces · newspapered ideas

September 5, 2017

People judge me by my skin. My skin’s purpose in life is to prove them wrong.

August 15, 2017

In all the books I love, the hero doesn’t strike first. But then again, none of the heroes look like me.

August 1, 2017

For eleven / years I lied about where I’m from, / ashamed by the music of endings, // that deep hollow bell. How much of my yearly / tax is spent to bomb the dirt / that birthed me?, is a question // I never wanted to consider.

July 11, 2017

‘Children are playing soldier. / Fetuses ripped from wombs dangle / in nearby trees. Yet he opened his mouth / and a flood of love melodies poured out.’

May 30, 2017

but this is boring. let’s talk / about something else. people are only lines / written with water it’s not that serious. i just want to drink / my coffee. i just want to think about roses i misheard / the words as a laugh, beautiful like a song of roses

May 9, 2017

I meant / to just take a photo of you. Forgive // my trespasses, my negatives, / but remember them. My ghosts // were asked to lay in their bed, / and so said: I am not like them // I am not. This is the blood I’ll leave / behind on bark to bark.

April 25, 2017

Oh Mars, you mistook me / for someone / I briefly was. / Girl alight / with impending loss, / vessel for bearing / out an arch / -itectural illusion. A wall / isn’t truly built / to exclude, but to instate / something worth defending.

April 11, 2017

‘Skin molted like a lazy adder/while sinew pooled like glue.//Bone fractured next/like desert rose glass/then melted too.’

March 23, 2017

‘When I held him in my palm, I learned to love what made me. From time to time, I think about my father, his country, clean hands. I like to think of his hands as clean. I like to think I owe nothing to his body.’

February 14, 2017

‘did I ever tell the teacher / we invented a new language that a pair of six year olds spoke fluent / appeasement she pointed to the globe told me to tell him / this is the world and that is America’

February 7, 2017

‘Cracking the spine, we eat // With fingers mixing and mashing, / ladling for one another, / Karaili, pommecythe, cur-he, / spooning and sliding into our mouths, / Wiping the leaf green.’

January 24, 2017

‘I roam. Sometimes in solitude; sometimes in a crowd. But unlike a dog, I do not die a little each day, subdued to the loyalty of my master. I die all at once if it must be.’

December 13, 2016

There are no refractions today / by the pepper flakes— in the glass. // The snails slept by the snap pea hooks / and cradles— I salted them. // Sometimes I drank / from a vapored gas— / I made ellipses with my glass.

November 22, 2016

‘My father likes silence and the past. // He votes for losing candidates (he is so unwilling to love charismatic men.) / He believes in the things we are given, like decency.’

September 20, 2016

How the steering wheel / points nowhere except towards itself. / And such is the spinning of the mind: / everywhere. When we drove into new / cities it was only a different shape of haze.

February 23, 2016

‘my hulled hands crash against the tide / to the unloved I will offer / a part of me / in hope my wards will be made complete / for another life’

February 16, 2016

‘There’s a piece of me / that has never been / to this country and another that never left. // I stare at strangers as if they might be friends. // It took three weeks of traveling / before anywhere looked like home.’

February 9, 2016

‘He knew the genealogies and coats of arms of / all his neighbors, with pride at its right hand and / cruelty at its left’

February 2, 2016

‘when I am dark/ when I am no more light/ when I am no / more an abomination/ when I am no more shame/ when I am face / again/ when the collective being of me worships god, family, / education and the collective administrative silver spoon, / then I will be back in the fold.’

January 26, 2016

‘We are given a face, / which means we are given / a vessel of blood to call body, / & lungs–that know the alchemy / of altering wind into breath–the way / plants are always transforming / someone’s last words / into oxygen.’

January 19, 2016

‘We melted in amnesia, bubbled up / from the ocean, rinsed clean / of appetite, all healed, / all negated, a sequence of two spines / imitating an arrow. A jaguar loved us. / He licked where our hips had been, / and we cucooked in reply.’

December 29, 2015

‘All your potatoes on the ground—you were never meant for this. The camerawoman tiptoes around spilled tubers as she zooms in on your front teeth, tearing open a parcel of dried shrimp. ‘

December 8, 2015

‘Being alive has again made something new, something that may not be true of justice but is a basic commonplace in evolutionary theory. To forebear is one attitude, rising in an infinite return another.’

December 1, 2015

‘If not agates, then barnacles, if not / sweet-smelling seaweed, then shattered shells./ The traveler need not journey on. // If not mussels, then sea glass, if not // smooth surfaces, then rocks pocked by anemones. / The traveler’s journey is one of return.’

November 17, 2015

‘Do you hear / the rainfall beating / on cowhide skin / father? It is the life / of autumn, / supernova / booming’

August 11, 2015

“I didn’t care whether they understood me, then I said, ‘Hello, hello,’ again, soldiers climbed out of their foxholes and looked at me, they couldn’t understand, but they knew where I came from, they just looked at me”

June 23, 2015

She petrified her / Secrets. “About what?” / That she’s been chosen. / “She chose silence.” How? / “Like the light, deeply / Fissured.

May 19, 2015

Upon entering a shrine, it seems to hold ghosts / The belly of an abbess suggests pregnancy / Behind a heavy curtain, the suggestion of people

May 12, 2015

They send flowers before guns now / all the thorns plucked from the stems. / An order to weave the dirge / before the mortar sings.

April 21, 2015

I was the smell of ripe lemons in his oxbone nation. I was never / brave. But, he let me eat butter, held me like an egg.

March 24, 2015

My mother left my father more than once. A favorite / family tradition observed when I was four. / Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Leaving is easier / the second time.

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