It’s not the contraption itself that I love—this pair of shells of steel and lace—but the woman who measures me and tests my straps as if armoring me for battle.

Why hide? To be found. Why be found?

Why did he shape my brother’s body to the contours of war? Is this the shape of all our language already?

I am at my threshold. / The dirt of our daughter. / The mole of her squirming body.

It's easy in the sense that all you have to do is get in the car and fire up the app. It's hard in that it requires long, monotonous hours to be fruitful, and constant vigilance to stay safe. San Francisco is a tough city to drive.

She understands the place she was born into is full of shadows. They slip into her open cracks, slide oozing into the gutters of her ribs, spill against the long, unbroken lines of her legs.

By recreating the past, I do not mean going back in a sentimental nostalgic way, but by rebellion and opposition to a world in which we see more and more borders, and walls.

I love expectation // beauty subsumed

We're not here yet, and still the key aches in the lock. I am leaving, and it's as if I was returning

As a witness should I run to her? Make sure she's not suffering a stroke or an aneurysm? I pictured a headline demanding the whereabouts of a witness who'd left the scene of a potential homicide.

blame grows small in the moth’s circling / day to day the slightest tooth loosens / a landscape changes until returning by habit

I'd never felt so sad engraving a trophy before, like I wanted to throw it away when I was done with it.

"I've always been interested in the invisible poem. When a poem is finished, what is the undercurrent? What is it still trying to say?"

When you greeted each other / your palms / like embers in cigarette stubs / red and hot / showed from your sleeves

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

my mother leaning in listening / her usual face her yesterday’s face / out cold on the couch

You have found out that someone dies every two seconds. This shouldn’t make you feel better, but it does.

The other day I received my first offer for term life insurance (how are corporations so prescient?), which has the effect of reminding a man he’s going to die, just as a baby has the effect of reminding a man that if he dies, it shouldn’t be for nothing.

He never finished a performance without making a prediction. His predictions, if right, would immediately boost his prestige and reverence so much so that when he passed his offering bowl around afterwards people would be more than willing to part with their hard-earned cash.

If I had known all boats eventually yield / to the current, I would have readied myself / long ago

excuse me this chambray tie / this cummerbund, these plain chops, / these dull lips. I’ve no guilt for gild's sake.

Bars or no bars, if you did have something worth having, they’d take it, whether you were ridiculous about home security or not.

You return, at last. / At the edge no longer./ At the margin’s curve no longer. / Circular no longer. / In the embers of unfading foam. / The sputum of inscrutable lava.

I learned to sleep as light as a new mother, in increments of minutes rather than hours, listening as I dreamed for a rustling of clothing, a knife unsheathed, and then I stopped sleeping altogether.

Before I am beautiful I'm in the hairdresser’s chair, / perched atop two phone books, holding my ear. My reflection / in the bathroom mirror is a landscape painting.

We think that Tinder is just for fun, swiping like in a videogame, like the 1980s game Frogger where the frog hops across the freeway and tries to avoid getting flattened by cars—this is how we feel about dating.

Elsewhere, some later year, I’ll try to be good. Today I don’t care.

SAFE Employees make a SAFE railroad. With SAFE employees, a railroad devoid of any mechanical safety devices CAN and WILL be operated safely.

as i hover above myself thinking about our fathers / how they were ushered from the least to best known borough / how they were fed so soberly into the moloch’s mouth

Brigitte watches her mother swat at a mosquito sending ashes from her cigarette into her coarse gray hair. She’s smoked it past the filter, an orange nub in her fingers the size of a peanut. She’s always been this way, siphoning the last dab of nicotine out of every inch of a cigarette. Brigitte has never understood this.

Back home is wider than my legs lost the beat when viper sting / hid your keys ‘tween his fingers and though he snorin’ I ain’t / lightfeet ‘nough to get ‘em you gon’ have to chain lang along

On the day I was born, the air was a supple stew—heavy with overripe fruit and armpits, ocean salt, and slow-roasted goat meat. Of course, I don’t remember that day, but I was born in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam—just ‘Dar’ to the locals—and the viscosity of the air is the first thing that visitors remark on. It is what they remember most.