Southern Sonnet
February 5, 2024
I’m trying to write you a love song but / the news overspills as I boil coffee.
Guernica
Audio
AudioPoetry
AudioPoetry
[The Tip of the Stalk]
November 6, 2023
The tip of the stalk / draws / the tossed flower —
AudioPoetry
Diversity Statement
September 5, 2023
In the years that formed me, I poured myself into classes, hobbies, extracurriculars I was told you’d like: Latin, Mandarin, Multivariable Calculus, Swimming, AP Physics.
AudioPoetry
Paper Hummingbirds
April 5, 2023
I’m afraid of what’s beyond the dishes / we wash in retrieved lake water.
AudioPoetry
At the Gallery
April 5, 2023
Finally at the gallery, the couple (all fiction of them), / she in that white bustier, he with the cutout
AudioPoetry
Gravitational Constant
November 30, 2022
Even after some time, I am still the weeping wound in the houseplant, / tearing easily.
AudioPoetry
Wrong Distance
November 16, 2022
Don’t you miss me as if I were dead? // That’s how you’d like to be loved.
AudioPoetry
Radical Surgeon of My Own Life
October 19, 2022
To wait for something to open, that’s optimism.
AudioPoetry
Brief History
September 28, 2022
The night the flag of the British empire came down / in my country, the cry of a mottled wolf was heard in the wild.
AudioPoetry
Cruel World As a Litany Of Stars
September 21, 2022
Forgive me, I did not mean to copy your life.
AudioPoetry
Search Party
July 20, 2022
Together, above the kitchen sink, we peeled / a hundred russets.
AudioPoetry
Bringing Up Mother
July 13, 2022
I was not dressed correctly when / motherhood interviewed me.
AudioPoetry
If I Say My Body Is Asian Does This Poem Disappear
June 29, 2022
Another poem mannequin- / Ing the body.
AudioPoetry
The Christmas Poem
June 15, 2022
there are thousands of days left / tens of thousands if we’re lucky
AudioPoetry
A Poem Is a Landscape of the Mind
June 8, 2022
It was the winter of my life. Afternoons, / I watched light fade / from the faces of brownstones.
AudioPoetry
When the Sky Is Closed
June 1, 2022
Not even children who brave the street / Will notice the robins, mistaking them for nightingales.
AudioPoetry
AFTER SEVEN YEARS I’M HOME AGAIN & ANIMAL AS EVER
April 14, 2022
I think back / to childhood— // to this state / & its former rainfall
AudioPoetry
Without Them
March 23, 2022
Thirsty / doesn’t describe what we’re looking for, / yet for some it means desperate for another’s touch.
AudioPoetry
Earning Keep
October 26, 2021
“You can see the pure it-ness / of anything if you cut it right”
AudioPoetry
The Daughter Myth
October 14, 2021
“Say then that I am overflowing / & nobody’s fool & did not give up"
AudioPoetry
My Mom Buried a Saint in the Yard
August 12, 2021
Not like you think, but yes, he’s upside down.
AudioPoetry
LOS ÁNGELES
March 18, 2021
We’re going to see the angels / my father says but in Spanish
AudioPoetry
Metamorphic Sonnet
June 3, 2021
How could I not praise the Chinese grandmother / rocking her floral print tracksuit?
AudioPoetry
Bulbous with an Egregious Silence
May 27, 2021
“while the aunties sit weaving an awful dress of effrontery / —and I wish we could be alive in several ways but this one”
AudioPoetry
Man at Desk
May 13, 2021
There’s a man who sits at his desk this evening, / bearing witness to the end of days.
AudioPoetry
The Empty City
January 10, 2020
I went to the doctor and found out / there is an empty city inside me.
AudioPoetry
Milk Teeth
December 23, 2019
I lean my open neck against yours. / The miracle always returns with a hunger.
AudioPoetry
indelible in the hippocampus
August 20, 2019
Memory is no solid monument but liquid’s / twins of substance and ceaseless swell.
AudioPoetry
Auto-Immune
February 27, 2019
I am destined to infuse / survival with meaning, like honey clotting in syringes.
AudioPoetry
Poet Wrestling with the Possibility She’s Living in a Simulation
June 25, 2018
One simulation to another, am I wrong.
AudioPoetry
you’ve always been a border simulator
May 7, 2018
you have trouble saying your name and you say it anyway
AudioPoetry
[My cadastre of flesh]
April 30, 2018
My cadastre of flesh / dissects me right to the bone
AudioPoetry
Edge of the Wild
April 4, 2018
I am so afraid of being troubled and alone at the end of this world
AudioPoetry
An Iranian Rat Prepares for Space Flight
January 8, 2018
I have no name unless I make / it back alive
AudioPoetry
At Mercier Orchards
December 15, 2017
we believe in ourselves / more than we believe in anything else
AudioPoetry
Where Papi’s Angel Speaks to Me About Love
November 29, 2017
mijo—i know you have seen the night / as an excuse to hold your body like a bottle
AudioPoetry
The last dog in the world
November 15, 2017
What are days? Just him and / the left-over spiders.
AudioPoetry
On a Lamp Post Long Ago
October 11, 2017
in case we have forgotten the word love, we will know its symbol
AudioPoetry
Je Suis Sally
September 27, 2017
"I am black wench, / wench Sally, African Venus, Sarah Hemings"
AudioPoetry
After Dinner
August 21, 2017
The serrated are only /
for dining, the curved ones for husking /
muscle from the bone
AudioPoetry
Black stars fill up black sky—
July 24, 2017
When the opal stone appears, I’ll lean into it. But terror is a runaway train.
AudioLivesNews
The Fallout
July 10, 2017
In St. Louis, America's nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.
AudioPoetry
The Song of Empty Rooms
March 27, 2017
Your voice is my favorite album, / you left but your bones are still here.
AudioPoetry
Number Love, My Taxes
January 23, 2017
how we are so many dependents, / how one headlight will do for now
AudioPoetry
Neck of the Woods
December 26, 2016
One girl might leave a trail of crumbs / Behind her. One might leave a line of poured-out gasoline.
AudioPoetry
Fourth Algorithm
November 7, 2016
I have trouble naming myself / In a language I can find.
AudioPoetry
Migrant Is Not a Metaphor
June 15, 2016
A migrant learns to love as mothers do, by trying and trying again.
AudioPoetry
Let’s Not Begin
June 1, 2016
Worry and console, worry and console: it’s how I stay in shape.
AudioPoetry
How Easy to Live with Choice
April 15, 2016
Oh it’s a gold rush of expectations this place.
AudioPoetry
Hyel’s Zumbi
April 1, 2016
Call his neck plum, when it bruises say the skin makes it easy to digest.
AudioPoetry
Straight to the jawline bloody Igor
March 15, 2016
Trumpets skyward, you know about it, side eye, you know how goes silence in the rock-n-roll
AudioPoetry
Twentieth-First Century
March 15, 2016
I vote with my feet. I vote with my wallet. I vote in person with my vote.