gingham dresses patched with ladybugs and hair tied with bows pulled out by snacktime i learn to rollerblade as my father jokes about...

Safety, the cold ambiguity of it. I grow thorns out of my eyes and hope they are sharp enough to defend. In some other street, a girl...

The first day is always cold. There is cider on the stove and in your hands. The clouds pressing hands against windows, the trees are a...

Do you know the feeling one gets when they look at a picture of a baby and they don’t remember that time for themselves, but they know...

This night unlike the rest, I sit on the stool in the living room, watching the second hand drag across the clock. The back wall holds...

In Manila, bodies pile where mothers bruised their babies to sleep, bodies’ limbs carving open the sidewalks, small paths that are now...

i wake up to slack-jawed day (with my arms intact) not intended i eat all of it (my underdone eggs) (and keep it down) not intended i...

your leftovers needed eating so you fed them to me plate after plate & i savored that decadent taste in my mouth picked at the last...

Hark the herald angel sings I don't know what Gabriel stands for but St. Anthony helps you find lost things walking down the church aisle...

Never have I dreamed you caught between the corners and long sweeps of stanzas, but again I thwart myself. My heart and liver leavening...

Minutes past noon, I see mother is still in bed. Now she shakes her head, shakes me away and will not rise. It is only the scraping of...

after the rain stopped pounding, we stood in the veranda watching vendors walk down the hill pushing wheelbarrows, balancing baskets on...

F,E with a squeal of scales Practice, practice, practice Frustrated mind Silence Heavy tick of metronome Lulls: Spotlight’s fog embraces...

is it alright to start at the beginning? kneeling, strands of seaweed slipping through my teeth, locked in an orange slice grin. imagine:...

honey-slow afternoon, trickling down my shooting green veins, venetian canals, in death fish float belly-up. the physics of it evades me,...

He had a black eye when he opened the door, I'm surprised my mom even let me stay. I comforted him as he cried sorry tears and wished my...

ink strokes on cotton. I was embarrassed by your feral howls but also intrigued— you were the one who looked like me. the color of a...

The summer we moved to the city, I was ten. I remember the sound of my mother's laughter ringing through the empty house, the way she...

last night, my mom whispered her run to my half-awakened ears. her tears, my inborn holy water, soothed me and her whimpers rushed me...

I won’t stop saying milk ‘wrong’, or writing with a real pencil. But we can walk around the track, I’ll listen to you talk about how much...