The grass / brims like tears, striving / to reach the brightest up at night. / How great it is in its fullest creativity, / sprouting with magic movements.
swallow. regret. cry. i’m sitting next to her, we’re in the car together, my mother and i are parked in a sonic drive-through
a broken lamp taped together in the corner of my room / summer bugs at night when leaving a lover’s car while the inside light is on
and the door is open—say, in August
I can’t stop dreaming about him. I don’t dream a lot—mostly because I don’t sleep a lot—but when I do, and when I can remember that I do, it’s always him
Diligently, we hope
Chemo, radiation, immunotherapy, ablation, etc.
Yet always, the exhaustion returns.
Impatient to find the place and formula
We wait for revelations
Instead, the repose of IV lines.
Received again: Hospitals, hygienic diversions,
Hell is all pillows
This time, hospice; by now you are half-bald.
One day in late April, after I turned seven years old, my parents woke me up, pulled a black dress over me, and hurried me into the car in which they then drove two hours south to the coast of Delaware.
He sent me a few words today, like he does at least weekly: “cheek by jowl”
where the north meets downtown and jp,
where my family went to comfort my ill grandparents
for the entirety of my childhood.
we walked two minutes down the street
like a brood of ducklings
to board the 131 to oak grove,
As I bike under the shades
Of trees growing wildly into each other
In the shape of tangled fingers I hear
From above a tune so overbearing
Waltzing back and forth between ravens
Like black holes draining light from the sky
Nani was never one for conversation. She spoke through the slight pursing of her lips, through creases in her eyes, through the rhythmic clicking of her weathered hands grasping knitting needles. I, on the other hand, speak near incessantly. I chatter as I wave hello to her, asking about her flight from Delhi to Budapest, where I moved with my parents a year ago.
Roses bloom through cracks of Linh Street,
Break through crumbling concrete,
In sunburnt oranges and bloody reds;
Their stems droop—heads grazing the gravel,
Heavy with fluffy fat petals
And sand we scooped into their mouths.
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