An old man will watch us, openly / stare, two boys in a Nevada diner / leaning towards each other, a touch / too close.

I told myself it wasn’t my responsibility.  I told myself it wasn’t my fault, and grabbed my flannel off the back of the chair, the bag of scripts off the sink.  I found my jeans at the foot of the bed, my shoes, my cigarettes, and I walked out into the cold. 

In a third smoke session of the night sort of way I ask him / what’s the worst thing he’s ever done. He searches me for the / fish hook, says he was unfaithful-a few times-to the first girl he / loved.

Any moment the doctor / will knock—the wait suspenseful, caught / breath before a jump scare.

Enter: The Clown.

Suddenly, the building’s main door banged open. Something heavy was being lugged up the stairs. Kevin slid behind me and dragged open the apartment door.

"Once it's official, start packing. Submit two copies of your letter of resignation. One goes to your parents, for their records."

I have letters after my name, but they are profane, so I do not use them. The saints in the catacombs would rise up and declare me anathema if I did. But the transcript says what it says.

Lay the snapping turtle’s corpse / on a swarming ant hill, // return to it after the flesh / is joyously devoured.

"The fear of Death was spoon-fed to me— / the drear of black velvet drapes // over glossy wood coffins, heartbeats swallowed / but never digested."

The last story Milena gave me was unlike all the rest. In it, a girl stood trapped on the strip of land between a lagoon and the sea, the sky black overhead, the cranes out to get her.

Immigration, assimilation, and trying to make it in a country – especially one where the primary language is nothing like your native tongue – can be traumatizing. But I had suspicions that there were other reasons for all the trauma.
Obviously, there’d been the Korean War where a ghastly three to four million people had been killed, and before that the callous Japanese occupation, but what exactly had taken place during these events?

I never meant to raise my own children, not all the time, anyhow. Not like this. Some days I really miss John, but really what I miss is when people could seem like whole cities instead of swamps.

"the curse of my child who you will/ bury shallow in the ground without/ a second thought"

"America has never been a racist country ……………………………………… 15%"

What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone.

The food taster is fulfilled in her job in a way she knows most others are not. Something about this makes her uneasy. Something about this makes her ravenous for more.

She’d been so good at laying still. Good at being frightened. During one of her early jobs, a gig where she’d started off alive, breathing long enough to be assaulted, the man had been so careful, making an effort to talk to her between takes

The whole process was so joyful, and it always is, even when I'm writing about sad things. I think it’s joyful because the thing I’m making is actually helping me process my own experiences and perception.

Without trying, D and B are helping me understand the truth about forever—that it works both ways and travels the earth in all directions, thwarting all human attempts to move forward by going backwards.

I’m not interested in likability with characters. I am drawn to characters who are complex, contradictory, and very particular in the ways that they might exist in the world, and that they are capable of holding contradictory views. That is how I see people.

Not long before I started doing drag, I asked my friend Sai to teach me how to bind. “Sorry,” I said. “I know you’re busy. I just think I need your help.”

From my window, I watched the pool’s plastic pit return to its former glory. Only when the refurbishment was complete, the pool refilled and made usable, did I discover Cathy existed, that the dull-but-probably-well-to-do couple next door had a daughter the same age as Gretchen Lowe.

"don’t ya know i cried when you died / i say kinfolk you ain’t dead / in me you be alive awaitin ya second comin"

“Hello, old friend,” she whispered into the void. The fullness inside her swelled. She never imagined that she would have welcomed his well-armored companionship. But how different he seemed this time, a herald of harmony rather than hostility. A true friend. Oh, how good it was to see him.

"I care to understand,/ upon the backs/ of mother’s hands/ who cradle the scars of eastern sunrise,/"

Permanently installed in my mortal mind’s corner sits Mrs. Eddy, ram-rod straight on her wooden chair, dark hair pleated, expression severe, Victorian jacket battened down, white ruff protruding round neck and wrists.

Forget the original myth, its violence, its finality, your own complicity. What if--instead of dominion--this could be about tenderness?

My poetry is indeed heavily indebted to my studies in history, psychoanalysis, political economy, and critical social theory; but I find that, at times, only via poetry can I adequately express the gravity and intricacy of not just a given fact, but what I should (like to) do in light of that fact.

"I wander among abandoned houses,/ asking beggars and passersby near the rubble/ if they caught sight of a stray wish meandering around."

I still think it is essential to at least sometimes focus on aspects of Palestinian culture and heritage outside of the conflict with Zionists. Doing this shows that we are not only defined by the current suffering and brutality; it is definitely part of the Palestinian experience, but it is not all of it.

We walk straight toward the things we want or need or have to reach, leaving a wake of our longing in the bare dirt behind us. We roll our eyes at the olds’ advice to slow down, to “savor,” such corny bullshit, we’ll slow down, maybe, when we arrive.

My mother lit her first cigarette on waking. My father smoked himself to sleep at night. They smoked as we carved pumpkins, sang Christmas carols around the piano, dipped eggs into bright dye. They smoked in our bedrooms while they read aloud to my brother and me. My mother, a skillful and innovative cook, especially for the time, smoked while making dinner every night, an ashtray balanced on the back end of the stove, lighting cigarette after cigarette on the gas burners under simmering pots.

"...arms now/ berry-covered branch/ —how awfully/ they must ache."

A Gothic style is ideal for narrating the conquest of the West because it’s a horror story that continues to unfold. Horror tropes that have their roots in the Gothic are ideal mechanisms for that type of narrative.

After discovering antipodal points and remembering Australia, I immediately started digging. It made no sense to believe that I could dig through the core of the earth but it didn’t make any sense to live the way me and my family, my neighbors, were living: threatened and afraid all the time.

My doppelgänger smells like wet fur and Old Spice. Even when we’re sitting in the dry air conditioning of my Jeep Cherokee, the scent — heavy with notes of yeast and nutmeg — is overpowering.

Mirror, mirror on the wall / Look down in mercy / The wheel is fixed / In a lonely place

I adopted my father’s fears, but the fear on tap at church spoke to what felt like my native suspicions—that harm was gestating in me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. I learned to be in constant fear of my thoughts, lest something unforgivable dash across them at the very moment of the apocalypse.