VOICEMAIL POEMS

I’ve always wished God could grow me down into an egg in the snow. White on white. Piles of drift. Back in Cincinnati my tongue grew red in the midday cold, waiting for someone to suck it like cherry popsicle. Those...

"paul wall drives me home after our sade concert date" & names me his favorite dime. rubs his hands on my jukebox thighs & bobs his head to dj screw along the lake. i lean into the purple of midnight & take his palm to...

Between months of silence, my father sends me communist TikToks from Chinese accounts. I assume they are pro but can’t know—I don’t have the app. What is between us remains unwatchable. But I want to look at him across...

Mom is sitting cross-legged on the hard kitchen floor, slicing cabbage and green onions for kimchi, covering her mouth as she laughs. She’s watching 7-year-old me in the living room, lip-syncing to Madonna and Whitney...

They say I appear in different places, to different people, at the same time. Saints bilocate too. If I had wings, my flapping would make every verb a we. Pain has splintered me. I am detached, restless, scattered to...

When I tuck my hands into the wool fingerless gloves, close them into fists, then open them again to the world When I drive to CVS to pick up my dad’s antibiotics, for healing the stitches Under a puffy bandage on his...

I want to own that electric blue Ford Fiesta again. Drive all night, & all day, & all night through. Let the odometer eat the miles it takes to marvel at an endless Texas, until the car runs out of gas, & I am staring...

I come in knowing where you are, hunched beneath the showerhead, breathing hard, swaying under the spray, eyes unmoored. I enter the tub soft-footedly, into the shallow water, circling your ankles until I become a small...

I was minding my own business when it happened. A flash of brown. A single ringing blow, then a dull thud. That was all it took to end the mourning dove. How our window shook to look upon its brutal work. At least it...

He left his toothbrush on my sink— a reminder so slight, yet it haunts me as surely as his touch. I pointed it out, as if I wished to free myself of it; he smiled as he walked out my door, and chained me with his...

plush meadow thick, like the mop of an evergreen love speckled instinctively with dandelions marking its fertility –i bring my palm to my duafe which beast of the divine bestowing her highest honor releasing it all...

i was born lake, formed lake even before that, the dig deep landscape before the motor, pine letter making berms where the snow retreats, so many parts of me are containers for water i had to move, i didn’t know this...

Saying I love you in my mother tongue is impossible. My mother never loved me in words. She gave up a continent for me, its contents traded for a feathered hope of better. For me, she went to scrub the floors in houses...

The bells like a leviathan breach the membrane of the liquid dark, tumbling forth like a vanguard incited by adrenaline and the call of drumbeats. The God Paradox States: 1. If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, He...

the vines awaken to greet the ripening day the sun climbs to its zenith scattering darkness from every corner you fold your sorrowing hands across your belly only yesterday there was a heartbeat your weary body tightens...