Magazine

Time was an instant, a moment.

It actually wasn’t that hard to invoke spirits around a table. They were everywhere.

His brother was both more native and worldly, one whose life was as mysterious to him as it was obvious.

I don’t blame you in a way. In a way? In all ways, in all ways I don’t blame you.

We leaned into the weedfire / with all the wavering love we could endure receiving / from each other.

It is not / only land that seems to lean up / toward me, but last night’s thick rains / soaked below it and, outside this city, / the clay beneath fields.

That sure as fangs a threat-pestered sheeny cottonmouth gon’ gape.

I remember her / so long ago / appearing on certain / Friday nights / as I religiously wasted / my youth watching / others embark / the boat of love

No one wants to be beholden to the past.

I had come here for a reason, though I no longer remembered what this reason was.

Mona looked left, out of the little window, to find the sun shining and plump rain falling in a manner that seemed cinematic and hopeful.

The curtain stays closed / until someone falls in love.

The beach is a game board of umbrella & umbrella, torso & orifice, a vortex / of engorgement & vomit & vice versa & back.

a week is measured in days and there are seven / just like the fingers on my hands without those ones I / forget, chopped off, bitten off, fell off from scurvy and flesh- / eating: intentionally brutal.

Everything on the table, the bed
and poem the poet found and put him in

Few ever really got to live there. / It was smaller than anyone ever expected. / Its lights were dimmed, though guards remained

Man Suk was a difficult person to be friends with. You couldn’t ask him for anything.

Harvesting the souls of men was full-time work—one could not serve God and mammon, didn’t she know?

She is not frivolous, except to those who see life as a problem.

I’ll bet Napoleon never tasted anything this good. Not even on his wedding day.

He winks and snaps off a shot with his index finger, peering into my eyes with a weird pity.

There are poems that allow us to be what we are, or what we want to be, without shame.

What is a country

The rice fields shine like rows of tinsel / the sun a neighborhood beggar in a lazy nap.

I memorize her face for our resemblance: an arched brow, a dark ring around the pupil.

I’m remnants. Remains of a teen, troubled, remains of a child, sling necked but alive.

I confuse love with nostalgia.

There are five petals to a cherry blossom, Nina chanted to herself. There is a kindness to cerulean.

I’m not actively trying to disappear.

I didn't like what he had to say, but I loved to hear him speak.