Category: Prose/Poetry
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lonely labor
the desk is altar and hearth / I am a religious cynic / I am still made of something that wants to be heard / hear me / hear me ask…
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choking on déjà vu
He says my name and tells me he “had a really nice time today.” I think I like the sound of my name coming out of his throat. I choke on something in my own throat. I think I’ve been here before. I think I’ve seen this story play out before. I conveniently forget the…
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what to do with my letters
What is a name if not the very word that affirms your existence? What is an envelope if not a vessel for me to store my words in, but also for you to store your response in—even if it never reaches me?
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orange
I can surrender my dreams but not my words / my happiness but not my peace / is the color orange something one can surrender / and is surrendering the same as sacrificing?
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blue burial (closure)
The easiest thing we can do is to see the worst in each other. Hardwired biology—avoided, suppressed maybe, but never erased, always lurking in the depths of us…
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womb
Most people, if they ever encountered god, would seek the meaning of life. I’d like to know why anger kept running in our family line, and why it refused to stop even when it ran into me…
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altar in the operating theatre
It is impossible to be a good daughter, sister, friend, and lover. Not all at once. Not individually. So I stay being a good writer. The least ink I will waste…
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shi
My love was a habit and yours a hobby. You made a villain and victim out of a star child; whose brightness are you reflecting now?
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bury the poet
To evolve, one must first die in some small way. One must trust the earth, really. The earth will strip her down to her bare bones. Discard the metaphors imprinted on her fingertips. Erase the allegories nestled in the crook of her neck. Expunge the imageries embroidered to the inside of her eyelids…
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death to the inflatable pool
The little girl—before she grew the capacity for sadness and grudges—in the inflatable pool on the slope of her Ama’s driveway looks at me. Doe-eyed. Fringe plastered unflatteringly against her forehead that will be kissed a hundred times over. A slight upturn of her lips. A chipped tooth…
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summer affairs
Summer is when things begin to rot, the most forgiving season of all because everyone knows everyone has something rotting in their chest of drawers. And so I urge you: atone for your dreams and not your sins so long as the sun is out…
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bedhead
If I cannot write your peace into existence, I will ruin my books to build four walls around just so you could feel safe. I will line my pens against the sky to fashion a roof over your head. I will sit with you in this unbearable, terrible silence until your lungs remember how to…
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blue burial (reprise)
Like all dutiful children, there was a time when I almost drowned. A case of unhelpful coordination and fear of bodies larger than I…
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her worst behavior in my collarbones
She’s back. She shows up in a ruckus at my door, swigging a bottle of wine, on her worst behavior. There is no incessant punching of the doorbell or rapping at the window demanding to be let in. I forget she still has a spare key…
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how to let a good thing die
He is wondering why I went off script the first time around instead of playing the role I was supposed to play in his head. And so could I really blame him for choosing to work with an understudy?
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sink your teeth
It is cannibalistic—my love—for I will strip off parts of my God-given self to sustain your being. It is like this that everyone who knows you thereafter has to learn the taste of my flesh. Let my demise postpone your decay…
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blue burial
Your moving on looks like swimming; mine looks like drowning. Do not confuse me for attempting to subdue you with the blue, I am only trying to prove to you its existence…
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daughter, desolate, depleted
There is no way of remembering how it felt to lie in my crib with four walls that constituted my whole world. I wonder, often, if I were to lie in it once more would it feel more like lying in my mother’s arms or like lying in a lidless coffin?
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taking the train to my younger self
most nights, I wish the world were ending the next evening. so I might take a train to my younger self and tell her to do us both a favor…
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a serpent at best
beware, my darling, for I am a serpent at best. the foul, slithering creature whom your tender gardens detest…
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and so we did.
you can’t love your home—no matter where it resides—if you’re selfish. that we are. if the world were listening, i would ask a singular question…
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words i left unsaid
Here are words I left unsaid. Not because the timing was never right. Not because I felt you were the wrong person to bestow them upon. Not because I didn’t mean them wholeheartedly. Here are words I left unsaid because I didn’t know at the time…
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i looked at her and saw
I looked at Her and saw myself. A projection of Her youth. A hallucination of who She had wished to become. Her hopes and dreams rest on my shoulders. Her nose and lips rest on my face.
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apocalyptic year
2020 was a year that no eight-ball saw coming. I want to be able to remember the highlights of our collective societies through a fun-to-recite poem that sings like a nursery rhyme. This is it. The apocalyptic year summed in 658 words…
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