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?

When asked why I still have faith after all these years, I wonder how could you not?

conjuring the Sahara in our orange hallways & together trekking across those impossible sands.

Mami tells me this spell as we pass the rosemary in the garden. As she carefully grabs a stem, placing it between the palms of her hands.

It has been three seasons since I last saw you, she hums. I was beginning to forget your face.