“He is oil, and oil is blood, and / blood is thicker than The Bible. His boots are thicker than the Bible. / His boots are leather made of old Bibles. His boots Are the Bible, / and the stool is the oil.”
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“Across generations, I—a child, an ass, / a pubic hair exposed—developed. / I longed for violation called love. / Dissociation altered my spirituality.”
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“A moment, then, of reckoning, / as the world burns and the institutions fall; / a weightless second dangling from the precipice of change / between the way things were / and the way they need to be.”
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“eyes watering like mine did at dinner after that call, my mom, / who lets the soft pages of her sorrel-colored bookstore bible lap at the toes of her shame like / waves, asking “why.” she didn’t ask “why” the way she asks my sister when she cries (her sins / are soft, white, and small. you can roll them in your hands like pieces of tender gnocchi)”
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“I ache for a daughter I’ve never wanted, / all squish and small and gasping. / I cannot throw her back into the sea and she dies.”
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jaawo a ye / bambo balanta / baa baa
for the enemy carries / those mandinka who resist / across the sea, to Europe.
enemy carri / Mandinka / cross sea
“Learn this: keep your hair hidden tight behind your / back so it doesn’t betray you. There are few things worse / than being imprisoned by a fistful of hair innocently free / under moonlight.”
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“in a splattered eruption / of leaking, lingering daybreak // we break / chalky, like the place between fruit and skin.”
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“the sun bear has two / states of mind waiting for lunch and waiting / for home. at home there’s always too long / before friday and sunday is loud.”
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“The trundling rubber of tanks and trucks / flattens za’atar thyme sprigs like bone.”
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“I think the dahlias / forgot to bloom this year, you say / as a way of saying nothing. How do I love / the things I cannot touch?”
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“the sun pulls oceans out our skin, bodies of water and asin / make nanay pinch her lips, pa kiss-kiss naman. she stuffs towels down our shirts and we / dance away, we full-fledged gravity defiers”
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“He’s been scarfing elegies down, / so many he couldn’t fly— / but rest and soak in it, his back to the sun.”
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“I preferred breaking the brown water with stones, / learning how big an opening I might make / into the murk managed by Army engineers; / but you wouldn’t let me.”
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“i have become the sort / of woman who, / when presented with / twombly and pollock, / has an / opinion.”
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“Noah sent the dove / and the dove found a branch around the corner — rested / stretched, enjoyed some alone time.”
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“Forest hugs / me close, the occasional sharp thorny fingernails / tracing taut calves or hoggish spider webs / licking face.”
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“Someday, her grief will / morph into a marble child. / It will stand in the living room for // visitors to see.”
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“Where avalanches cough bold glacial till, / we’re staggered by the wind—by ageless will.” Combining a compelling use of rhyme and a purposeful collection of sound, this sonnet speaks excellence in nature poetry. As we travel with the speaker from ‘the folding-map‘ to ‘tablelands of awe,‘ readers are reminded of the smell of a roaring adventure.
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“his trill after trill tickles your belly, your joy / escapes like a breath you don’t need to hold.“ Not a word wasted, vivid and moving, this sonnet is a work of gentle joy, of life’s truth, of beautiful alliteration and sound.
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