The sky, a flawless blue,
the kind of California day,
that gets under your skin.
Scaffolds holding up the heavens
stretching against celestial infinity.
Is there a placeholder for me
in that expanse?

Ada walked through their neat front garden, which looked as unremarkable as yesterday. The front door key still fit in the lock, and she let the keychain dangle a moment. She unbuttoned her brown coat then bent to dust off her trousers and retie a lace in her leather shoes. Her wristwatch said it had only been twenty-four hours.

Flamingoes all pink and proud
at the Junior Museum & Zoo.
Kids & grandparents all aflutter
flocking to public feeding time
in a fluff-and-strut club of cute.

Because it’s always dusk, we make everything neon: our clothes, our furniture, our streetlights. The City is far north enough that the sun never breaches the sky—it skates the horizon’s rim, dips up and under like a coin circling the drain. Neon is our bioluminescence, and it’s always cold in the city.
I don’t remember how I started researching liminal spaces. Couldn’t even say which ology my post-grad work is classified as.

no music, only the daylight, the green
of the trees growing, so fresh and bright,
imagine a leaf, a single one of them
held to your cheek, in its chill,
its refusal of heat, this early in the year,
the stars so far from here, the birds
in their lightness going about their business

If time could fly backwards instead of forwards, could I love you in reverse?
In the beginning, a farewell. Two lovers say goodbye. An embrace begins to loosen before letting go. Hands that clasped tightly together, slowly slip apart; a space opens between palms, fingers are no longer entwined.
The attraction that once drew us together turns into a force pushing us apart.

Marco Merletti came from a long line of magicians. His mother Talma was a noted mentalist from the old country, capable of convincing the Tuscan villagers of her inscrutable powers of clairvoyance. The moment her searing brown eyes alighted on a young woman’s tearful face or an old man’s trembling white handkerchief, she knew who had been the mistress of whom, who was to give birth and why and countless other secrets the country people thought were their own.

This bathroom, shared with a dozen others. Now, three years on, she’d pause in this bathroom. To retrieve that spike of energy when, finally, after interviews and tests, she secured her right to live in this building. To know its ways. To share this bathroom.
L-shaped, the shower far back in the alcove. The slant to the drain steep enough to alert bare toes. The basin’s obese taps with Hot and Cold in foxed enamel. Their bolts and washers industrial and gleaming.

I feel as hollow as the empty black circle staring at me from the screen. The nurse practitioner is quiet as she scans my uterus. A push to the left, a push to the right. Left, right, left, right. I gaze at the monitor, searching for what I’ve waited seven weeks to see: a white blob floating in a black ovoid sea, outlined by a bright white line.
Left, right, left, right. Back and forth, the cold probe pushes against my insides. The empty black circle keeps coming in and out of view. Nothing else.

Sophia built her first shrine when she was six years old. She took a fragment of a fallen bird’s nest, decorated it with dandelions and acorn shells, and surrounded it with a circle of stones on the surface of a tree stump in her backyard. The tree had come down very recently, and she’d been staring out the window at the place where it used to be. No one had taught her to build this shrine; she had no word for what she was doing.

Arleen Dunson was there. She was there, outside Boise, among the other surrounding police, when three pit bulls came blitzing towards tactical from around the corner of the decrepit house, like sharks with legs, swinging ropes of drool, rodeo-eyed and thinking kill kill kill. Two of the dogs were hooked and pulled away, no problem. The last one, incensed and alone in the dust, bucked and sprung back and forth…

Discarded on the train tracks,
a crushed bag of potato chips,
bright red label glaring.
Two bus drivers linger
by their idling vehicles—
one bends to his lighter,
the wreath of smoke
drifting briefly

Sometime around 1912, twenty-two-year-old Great Aunt Annie took a photo of Mayme and Beth, two of her younger sisters, standing on opposite sides of an unnamed friend. They were all eating apples at the same time. Annie framed the scene with her camera then snapped the photo, capturing their impish goofiness on black-and-white film. The smiles hidden by the apples show in their eyes.
Ninety years later, in February 2002, I was hiking with my three daughters,

The water began to rise from the soil three days after the storm passed. By then, the rest of the valley and the neighboring town had become feverish again with the heat of early summer, and all remnants of rain had completely disappeared. It was a thing of magic, the townspeople said when they finally drove the five miles into the lowlands of the valley to see it with their own eyes. Water seeping from the depths of the earth.

Evelyn’s caramel colored
fingertips rub center of an orchid.
Soft saturated purple petals

awaken her eyes, like discovering
carving of ancient writings.
The Nile River on cave walls.

These few days, the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare has become the center of attention of the media, and the talking points extend to the injustice of America’s private insurance system introduced to patients. I am staying in Taiwan now since September and have gone through the healthcare treatment many times for my injured knee and chronic problem of Spondylolisthesis. I would like to talk about my own experience enjoying a healthcare system that’s totally different from America’s.

Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend.

Are you listening? I have access
to all the words, at least

hypothetically. Language, emotion,
cognition commingles in combinations

infinite, experiments replicable,
but only barely, in theory

The 2024 presidential election’s over: I’m starting to sleep better again; my blood pressure is returning to normal. It didn’t surprise me that Donald Trump won the election; it just appalled me.
It didn’t surprise me that during the campaign, Trump supporters saw those of us that opposed his election to president as the enemy; nor did it surprise me that we saw Trump supporters as stupid, naïve pawns.
It did surprise me, though, to learn that my girlfriend was the enemy.

The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it.

Walking at dusk again,
and stray lines tap
on my mind’s window,
looking for a poem.

A generation of kids wanders into a DIY venue and gets their fill of drugs relevant to their generation and locale. Blues, speed, blow in Denver it’s cheap grass. And the ever-present booze. Piles and piles of discarded PBR, Miller High Life, and Rolling Rock cans with a few of the well-off kids’ craft beers thrown in for good measure. An aluminum salvager’s wet dream.

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. It’s strange, I know. Mermaongs are supposed to be adventurous. We’re meant to love every part of the ocean—from its glittering surface to the rotting hull of a drowned ship, to the thrill of the Deep Dark, where the blind fish and the shadows with teeth live. There is always some measure of dark: the shadow of fish or sharks, a cloud passing overhead, the shape of something in the distance.

The moment we turn the corner,
a cold front hits,
a carpet of chilly air
unrolled at our feet.
I pull my cardigan tightly
around my chest, hold it closed.