or his throat, or his lungs, or his song, his body now gills all over, now there, all the way over there beyond this

the spaghetti tastes jollier when it costs a six-and-a-half hour drive to jacksonville, florida, the closest home of jolly spaghetti

as if the memory of you left a trail, breadcrumbs scattered like rose petals along the aisle, perfect footprints in the rose-white snow.

there's a layer of dust on my crocodile skin i've been in southern california so long the hawk cuts an arc in the sky and agrees

We watch the house wrap itself around her. Light and heat return to the earth.

i am allowed to be both a rose and its thorns, a work of art and the glass that encases it, all at once

I am a daughter of the Diaspora The blanket woven by my motherland Adorns us each in gold

Our love was a palindrome names almost anagrams of each other letters interlocking like his fingers and mine

She loves me, she loves me not, Time will only tell as she pluck-pluck-plucks away my petals.

Don’t know where she went the young girl singing in the mirror – Crowded House and REM

Claustrophobia comes at me in moments between dusk and nightfall.

We look up at the sky and see blue; uninterrupted and no one tells us we need to step out of the sun our skin a cloudless glow, we stretch

Because I can’t see your eminence while you're crushing and washing out your gem in never ending rivers full of cautioning ink.

I haven’t figured out what good parenting looks like maybe a dollar to not skip class two

Would you have loved me If they called me Jasmine Instead of Sampaguita

Nani-ji told us stories, long stories and made-up stories, and maybe even true stories of everything she knew everything she’s gathered

With Tamar’s jokes and my elders’ faces flash on tweet after tweet Rest In Peace, I don’t want to be here.

April brings a hundred-degree spring, so I read in the backyard; a book of love poems you gave me for my birthday last year

the showers are too weak in our new house, or else I am too weak, letting water pass right through me

how do we show up in our stories, when elders are no longer around?