We want fires that burn. Poems that hurt. Words that are so painstakingly blunt they break barriers. People that are so honest it brings others to their knees. Eventually, they will beg and they will plead. “Please end your statement with a period and not a dagger.”

The painted buntings used to pair among the fractured feelings neither bunting nor feeling, came to assist their harvest what was settled among the field, a Hairy bear (one that laughed) slinked in from the wilderness

Three boys, bare-backed, draped elbows over a life raft. It was a spring mid-day. A fourth propelled himself into the air drew up his knees to his chest and cracked the surface, causing his friends to shake their heads and dab at their eyes.

I wish you would take the time you need. Enter and enter again until clarity comes and you leave with all the answers. We talk of the weather to avoid talk of the things that matter,

The house was never silent after I was born, but not because of baby wails or shrieks. It was because of the TV. TV whispers woke me every morning and swayed me to sleep. The flickering light filled the hallway in a comforting glow that made the dark seem less menacing in the midst of night. It cloaked the actual silence, the short but frequent absences. More so, I’d come to know the TV as my mother.

Jurgen was skeptical. Cautiously, he tugged on the line to make sure the grappling hook had found its hold. It had. Stable as the cable seemed, though, it proved difficult for Jurgen to identify how, specifically, hijacking a 19th century galleon stranded in the gelid black waters of the Arctic Ocean might help him find a sense of purpose.

Brett invites me over after school to grind his rail, which is of little consequence to me, since I can barely ollie straight; but sometimes I can heelflip, which makes me believe in improvement and wards off the stomach-eating-reality that skateboarding, for me, cannot be sustained,

I walk down the highway today as cars rush by, travelers for the holiday hurrying to get to their destinations. It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and traffic is heavy. Across the road, I see a dead bird with distinctive feathers.

I spent the first moments of my life not really in it. When most babies are born, the process is straightforward. They come out. They cry. The doctors and nurses check a few things to make sure everything is working.

The plan was simple, the execution a bit tricky, but I was ready. Man, was I ready. Or maybe I was tired of trying to figure out what might go wrong. I just wanted to get going. We’d certainly spent enough time puzzling over the damn details.

Toshihiro arrived at the Osakako station fifteen minutes earlier than planned. As he left the subway, he realised the sun had already set while he was underground, making him feel as if he travelled to a place more distant.

Malawach, the bubbly Yemenite pancake bread oozing with meat and vegetables, bloated the teachers’ American bellies, as the tour bus spirited them away from the trendy restaurant to the terraced sidewalks of Jerusalem’s Tayelet.

I don’t remember if this was before or after the fumigator accidentally lit our house on fire in 2002, which turned out to be sort of a mixed bag in the long run, but I have this picture in my head where Bunny is running toward me down a hallway and then she’s in my arms,

“Dad,” someone was saying. “Dad. DAD!” And now poking, he noted. “Yeah. OK,” he said, lifting his head from his arms. “This place is disgusting,” his daughter told him. “Well, daughter mine,” James muttered. “Of all the gin joints you could have found me in … at least this is a gin joint.”

By the time she selects a third papaya, he’s already certain that it’s no coincidence that she’s across the street from him right now. Even from here, he feels an instant connection. This means that they have known each other in a past life. His father has said that: The full influence of karma is only understood through dedicated, daily meditation. He ignores those words and watches as she hands a papaya to the vendor who wraps it in newspaper and hands it back to her. She lowers it into a wicker basket and then turns slightly away from Tuum to pay. With her back to him, he notices that her skirt nearly touches the ground. She wears flat sandals and her hair is gathered in a single knot at the back.

What’s New, What’s Left I keep stray hairs, those golden lines pulled by comb and air before you question my disease, my battle and bait that I cannot shed.

If This is Love you love me like a getaway car/an extra foot of rope/the single phone call/a life jacket/what i mean
is/you love the way that i am/always ready to save you/that i will get my hands dirty               knees
bloodied         everything bruised/so you don’t have too/i don’t ask what you are willing to do for
me

3^rd Floor Up The days started
getting slower and faster simultaneously.
And I lost interest.
But at the same time,
they raced and I couldn’t see them pass.

Landscape You can’t trust what you see
in the mottled blue and violet
around a black eye.
Real monsters are the ones
we don’t recognize at first.

Brotherly Love We start out soft as Egyptian sheets – boys,
then we manufacture into men. Notice how the word
men, sounds harder, stiffened by our insides churning
to stone as we grow.

Failed her I failed
her. Was not
good enough because
no one can ever be
good enough to carry
the burdens of the
dying on their backs, to
be blessed with the
baggage of existential
emotion that makes life so
sweet as to make it unbearable

Muted jazz music bleeds from the walls of the dance studio. My sister and I stand outside and watch, through the glass windows, the varying figures of the dancing pairs: men of assorted heights in jeans and colored button-downs, women in heels and dresses and skirts of subtle hues of green and blue and black. Some of the couples, the more experienced ones, move like waves on a breezy spring day, undulating as a unit across the wooden floor. Other couples sputter like the animatronic creatures at Chuck E. Cheese. In the whole room, there is only one moving mouth. It belongs to a woman who appears to be the instructor, standing to the side, watching the dancers and counting the beats of the music for them.

When I was ten years old, I experienced the miracle of childbirth. I was there when my sister was born – not in our living room at home, or in the back of the taxi, but in the hospital room with my parents and the labor coach and the obstetrician. As you might imagine, this experience has proven to be a pivotal one in my development as a daughter, a sister, and most importantly, a woman.

Dear, It is Saturday and I am obsessed with the arc in a story. Let me start over by saying the fickle obsession hasn’t grown into a so called “problem” yet and at every glance a person will find a way to say that humility comes in regular shapes and sizes. Perhaps, it bags its own groceries or even paints its very own toes. It does this to iconically display a varying right or degree of neutrality. Maybe, by staying in the middle ground, we never have to fall short of dancing a wild night in the background or the shadows.