Poetry

I cannot remember the last meal I shared with my father.
Only those long last nights slipping him what ice chips
he could still stomach and then swabbing his chapped lips
with a wetted pink sponge.

Confusion is the foreigner’s advantage. Natives 
tamp the nuance in their sounds. Stranger 
seeking refuge pockets vowels, picks gesture,
learns body, gets caught up on the cobble 

Imagine you could learn 
the names of every river,
each upthrust mountain
and fault folded on itself:

There must’ve been some incident, something to push both Dickinson and Proust into isolation, the horse thought as a student, but now he thinks time and immortality require one’s full attention. 

go to the library to learn how to administer NARCAN
to stop their mother or father’s heart from overdosing. 

I would be Diogenes. Swing my lamp
through these dishonest days in search.
I myself have looked the known world
over and given everything a new name.

Your heart is like an island, like a bomb chambered for containment and you should handle my heart like a rare species of flower that grows only here, like a thing that can destroy.

This is the sound love makes—
tolling of a tongueless bell, its wagging
and wagging despite; its whole head
teeming with wind. The sound

Rats can laugh, but the dogs aren’t smiling: they’re hooked on oxytocin, which rises when we lock eyes with one another. Oxytocin is not dissimilar to OxyContin, an opioid analgesic which can result in a similar sense of euphoria or...

At a certain point, I lost you. I came to know it first 
as a weather, the earliest hour of day breaking 
on the bedsilk, its low rung of light, a pregnant silence.