anyway, i keep thinking about the old laptop we passed around after school,
blue light pooling over our faces like a second puberty—hot,
cords under your desk, knotted around our feet.

My mornings always began the same way—I woke up and saw the wall. On that wall was a thin strip of torn wallpaper that grew wider and wider each day. If I managed to tear off too big a piece, I knew it was time to cut my nails.

I squeeze past a bedraggled goat and other passengers as I snag a stained seat by the window. My foot gently scooches a live chicken to the side while I stuff my belongings below me on the floor. The scented mixture of sweat and damp livestock permeates the air. Outside the bus window where I sit in Nchelenge, young boys shout at riders to buy food. I open a book, attempting to tune out all the chaos around me.

There’s no proper reaction when your mother tells you over the phone, “Your father is dead.”
And how words hang in your throat as she explains, through sobs, he died in a tractor accident, when the vehicle flipped, and the rear tire ran over his head—he took his last breath in your mother’s arms.
So you book the fastest flight from San Diego to Pittsburgh.

She never forgets to water the piano
So that under her fingers white rivulets
Punctuated by black peninsulas
Maintain the tonal integrity
Of each percussive encounter.

Between the yellow canola stalks that whistled in the wind, rippled like waves, shimmered like the hush of sunlight on silk, and towered two heads above me, I forgot the why and the how. They had slipped from my mind like rapeseed, dispersing in a summer wind.

Malignant neoplasm of the kidney.
Forest Hill Memorial Gardens.
October 3, 2020.
A rumbling danced under my feet. A hearse violently reversed towards your tombstone. A myriad of cars flooded into the cemetery. Standing under the tent, my hair growing back thick locs falling over my face again. Clods of dirt lifted themselves, peeling away from your body as if the earth were inhaling backward.

“You’re cutting it close, aren’t you?” Frank asked Joanne. He liked to be a little early for lunch to claim his usual table by the window. From it, he could see most of the dining room and the door to the kitchen. He didn’t like the hustle and bustle from the staff or the loud conversations from residents at other tables…

The sky had been clear and blue when Johnny left the pub that morning, the sun so bright his vision blurred as he transitioned from the darkness.
“The last pint might have been a mistake,” he said to nobody in particular as he zipped his windbreaker…

The house we live in is built into the side of a hill where invasive French broom and oleander plants grow wild after it rains. The treetops above the ridge shield the state of the sky, so I look to the west to see what kind of day it will be. Usually visible is Mount Tamalpais, a point so tall it pokes above the thick, opaque fog that rolls in and out like the tide.

One-Cent wasn’t his real name,
just the name taped on him
by authorities who had their own purpose,
taped on the wood of his forehead
at a slight angle, trueness unimportant.

By the third time the thought arrives, I’ve learned its manners. It doesn’t kick the door in. It doesn’t announce itself with a villain’s laugh. It comes the way a smell comes when someone two apartments down starts frying onions at midnight. A faint, unmistakable curl in the air. A suggestion. A maybe.

The vast interior of the store hummed around her as she stood where she always stood between the stacked baskets and the queue of people. The soles of her feet pulsed, concentrated at the heels, and it was only when her tummy gurgled, an elongated growl which petered out into a squeak, that she could take her mind off her soreness for a second and focus instead on the incessant murmurs of customers, some discussing whether to buy one brand of biscuit over another, others talking on the phone about things they did not really care about, employees greeting customers and waving them bye-bye, with a backdrop of the supermarket jingles she’d been listening to for the two and a half months.

It’s a chilly Sunday afternoon in late October; I drive past a busy garage sale and pull over to check it out. I navigate the lawn’s clutter, heading straight for the garage. The first thing I notice upon entering is an unusual doll sitting on the edge of a shelf.

I am a catafalque
rising pretentiously
like the pie in Jason’s oven
out of a conflation of a changing self
& a pile of remnants of Nan’s DNA.

Rose had always been a profoundly uncurious person. Which is not the same thing as being stupid. Conventional you would say. To be frank, she went into medicine for the money. Yet, the allure of convention also prompted her to become a doctor. Medicine is prescriptive, not only in terms of the prescriptions doled out to the patient, but also in the actions dictated by the medical canon for the physician.

Quill-feathery high-minded rhetoric declaiming
on life liberty … well … try pursuing happiness
if you’re woman if you’re enslaved or poor
unpropertied or indigenous facing genocide.

I think we all agreed that Mr Fallow was the best and most interesting teacher in the school. That much was clear after only a few months. It wasn’t until Cerys Davies expressed curiosity in his sexuality, however, that he really became a figure of fascination for us all and perhaps for me especially. He wasn’t from around here, you see.

Good girls can’t lie, but they can’t always tell the truth, either. We must be well behaved but not prudish. Smart, but not boastful. Attuned to others’ without being needy. Strong, but silent. It’s a club I began subscribing to after my parents’ divorce. I joined without anyone telling me I had to, embracing the unwritten code without giving it a second thought.

Here comes another one. Amelia was scrolling through her social media platforms looking for amusement when an instant message pops up on her screen. She clicked the message, saw that a famous actor was messaging her and asking her to friend him.
Amelia was by now well-versed in how this interaction would go.

Standing amid the death-censors
“You cannot succumb to Thanatos
all for all”, I said to them to ward off
their collective suicide. Unheard.

Old Francisco Gutierrez lay in his bed, his stomach heavy and bloated. A white porcelain soup bowl crusted with the remnants of lunch cluttered his nightstand, joined by numerous orange plastic prescription vials, some tipped on their sides with a few crumbled pills inside, as if defeated by the weight of their responsibilities.

Ang Tuin’s temple was large and airy and now painted white, which he hated. All through his second life, there had been wood panelling which had filled the space with a rich scent of beeswax and nutmeg, but the tall men had come to make another one of their changes.

I’m not one to admire change. I’ve been here
for billions of years and will be for billions more,
and in the time it has taken me to draw a single breath,
you meat puppets went from pissing on the savanna
to whipping past my feldspar plains a dozen times