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Family & Ancestorsexpand_moreYou are home in your bed like a soft animal with really intense feelers.
Walking on Canal Street, I slipped on the curb and fell on my face.
All of those feelings—you do not have them, they have you.
These days, I am less of an irony detector and more of a lyrical drone.
He loathed them most, despising their desire to get on with things.
A family becomes fossilized—a darker crosshatch etched in hard sand.
The year we left the reservation a white boy gave me a trash bag.
Come winter, they go to the funeral early & count the living.
Having held down the past applying pressure to its sacrum . . .
Stocking shelves, like serving, is a job that will not let go of your mind.
I remember the sun on the mountain like a trembling drop of lava. When the lasso dancers were done, they kicked away like wild colts.
He was caught. Of course he was caught. He was always caught.
I know what it means to be born in one life and meant for another.
The judge’s mother was impossible; her mere presence was infuriating.
We work to house the water yet know we cannot keep anything.
Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help.
When the thugs from the bank showed, up my father laughed.
Claim to be Choctaw or Cherokee. Claim to be a princess too.
You are the only one who knows not to pour water on the flame.
I only divine the cat’s location when I hear its small cough.
He was a child. He was dead. He was the shaft of a Long-tailed Astrapia.
It had always been this way. Mothering, for my mother, was a cameo role.
The solution, she’s discovered, is always to err on the side of caution.
My brush dissects her slick-back black hair to expose ugly white.
I can only say I am here searching solo for remnants of Seoul Drive
She sits in her wax like a candle. A woman comes, a woman goes.
There’s something I saw at the race meeting I can’t figure out.
It was an act that made me feel safer but also somehow more imperiled.
The ashes of a human being are not ash. The body burns into wood.