05.20.2026 - Guilford, Vermont
late spring,
May moved over the floorboards
like air through warped-blown glass.
her body was spread there, yolked,
hoarded in the gutters like rainwater.
I imagine the library at Packer Corners
smelled of damp and old as a lush June climbed
the faded, wide, wooden planks outside.
Jade and I gathered in disorder
across the table before the stage barn,
plates and carafes of wine,
rapt in the play. those mountains
we traversed were as protean
as Vermont weather,
jeans more scorched earth
than fabric.
a summer visit is blood to us,
collected in our thumbs.
her smile, even, a cowry shell
that I saw in the water.
chi writes poetry
25 posts in this topic.
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05.27.2026 - dinner at eight in the suburbs
last night, I dreamt that we were driving
through a city of old lakes (and we were,
and we did).
tonight, my legs are wide and sprawled out
and looking like a marriage bed atop a white blanket.
you cannot mourn what is not yet dead;
you are like a second birthday to me,
all forgotten about. -
06.03.2026 -
home again, I hid underneath blankets
like a kingfisher and waited for you for hours,
until eventually the clock stopped working and my father had
to come in to get me up.
it was 83 degrees the day I came back,
heat swelling from the ground the way your cigarettes did,
dangling from the fingers of your left hand like old puppets.
later, that hand would find its way onto
the curve of my spine and I’d go numb.
that first night back, you read to me the way
my father always did; you were best at making me feel
like I was three years old all over again. -
06.12.2026 - here before
you are
calling the pot kettle-black,
a blackberry stain on silken sheets,
the gun-smoke-clouded streets of Boston:
miles and miles of vellum. birch bark littered
the pockets of summer like whirring needles,
the body’s limitless wealth of poetry,
voiceless, writhing out of our eyes
like lights. I tell you that
you look like boats docked
along a Massachusetts coastline. -
06.19.2026 -
my sister careens on
the East Coast, touches Topsail with her lacy fingers,
and I cross mine: wheels and wheels
like lockstep men march inland.
I'm up so late.
my best friend dreams
in the wayside, somewhere west of me
after a long day of convincing her boyfriend
to high-tail his ass out of Raleigh.
they say it's overdue,
that it's been a while. -
07.19.2026 - ultraviolence
i. this is not me angry.
my family tree is knotted and webbed, but every member
has a place, and if you’re lucky, a purpose. my mother’s
purpose is to cook soup for the Passover Seder. I picture
Passover as bloody as when the planets forget to flash
across the sky. this happens.
I have seen it the way I’ve seen a girl
look at me from across a wooden table.
ii. this is not me angry.
I can never remember. when I walk by you, I make sure to shuffle
my feet even quicker than I usually do, because I want to forget
about my body. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. I don’t even
look into my favourite lake anymore. the way it wrinkles together
hurts as much as my father’s nails do, my father
scraping against my scalp.
iii. you were good for something
but don’t ask me exactly what. -
07.27.2026 - where damage isn't already done
here I am because ghosts
can't leave the place they died.
my blood is in the other bed, sucking in
snot and stomachs. I know your skeletons very well;
I know we dance and bleed together when you walk down the stairs,
when my little finger pushes all the bite behind my canine teeth.
I haven't felt myself in weeks.
I haven't felt this way since my foot-soles kissed
Casa Grande and burned a hole in my nose.
you miss poetry in the purest way;
I miss your hands but only on my shoulders
and nowhere else. -
08.03.2026 - you're so last summer
I am not a wolf like you think I am, the way there is no fur to cover my belly. growing older means: less ghost, more gritting your teeth. it was after this summer that I turned spirals, that the ridges in my throat grew deeper. -
08.19.2026 - fear is primal and raw; it latches onto you and won’t let go, until you let it.
beware of invasive bugs; moths especially. / they are bottle-green, like a pond. / in my head, it is 1919. / in 1919, there are no invasive bugs, not that I know of. / in my head, there are peanuts and pine, the smell of cologne and sweat mixed together; / ocean water lapping at my toes, bringing me back to cleaner days; / addendums, beginnings, and wandering the hospital hallways. / the ocean's gone dry from no rain, it’s all muck. / there are no fish and there never were any, but snapping turtles, bullfrogs with eyes that peek above the surface, / water boatmen that skit the glassy surface of the pond avert my eyes. / beware of invasive turtles, blanketed in duckweed, / in the sunlit clearing of eleven cottonwoods. / when I was younger, I caught tadpoles in a mesh net, and I let them go. / I bury your box of notes and some cicadas / in a hole in the earth, somewhere outside my front door. -
08.27.2026 - "tell me something terrible," you say.
at night, it is father and his gun.
it is being a poet, 2026;
being a date palm in the Negev Desert, 1452;
being the soccer field my father played on, 1981;
being Sigmund Freud in South Tyrol, 1911;
being a poet, 2016.
thought: I am not a poet anymore.
there was a hunger in my stomach back then,
rooted down like an apricot pit, a pit of guilt.
I could not shake it, the hunger.
reminder: I am not a poet anymore.
there are still times when I think that I’m writing, by accident.
if you open your ears to poetry, you can hear the rumble rattle
of engines as you walk along to look out at the reeds.
I sit on a bench nearby and hum amongst the warblers,
a line of poetry you’d know.
I said, a line you’d know.
I said, I still can't shake it, the hunger.
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