The lights of the city shine brighter than any star.

a cool breeze cuts through the humid night air.

the sidewalk is cracked by too many steps in everyone’s one-thousand-mile journey.

clouds

pink and blue smears

go over my head

like the moon

or calculus.

i long to float up there

where i could eat eclipse and crackers

and differentiate my thoughts.

look at them,

so cavalier, drinking

future-liquor in a future-

The night was warm and a blue haired girl sat alone at a bar. She was at one end, trying to catch a glimpse of a woman sitting opposite, a woman with long dark hair and caramel skin. Robyn knew her from somewhere, she was sure of it.

She stood in front of a mirror

Clean and sober thinking about how she feels taller than her own reflection

Then she took an injection

They’ve run out of garbage bags to use as body bags.

Power lines cracked in half like splintered pencils are strewn through the streets

neighborhoods panic as the ground forgets what being solid is again

“What is one factor that affects the Blood Alcohol Level and is an extremely important factor (in order to ‘sober up’)?”

It’s midnight, and he finds that it’s impossible to sleep. He isn’t exactly sure why, though he suspects it’s because his mind has wound itself into a series of complicated knots. There’s an abundance of loose ends as well, and he wonders which one carries the most weight. 

Another black kid got shot by a white cop.

ANOTHER BLACK KID GOT SHOT BY A WHITE COP.

ANOTHERBLACKKIDGOTSHOTBYAWHITE COP.

ANOTHERBLACKKIDGOTSHOT

ANOTHERBLACKKIDGOTS

Ten . . .

Nine . . .

Eight . . .

Seven . . .

you are like the sun:

oblivious to time’s existence

wake up at noon to eat dessert

and watch television reruns.

you are sleepless nights

and grease stained fingers

covered in cuts and bruises and scabs.

you are like the war

Like clockwork revaluations to new forgotten ideas lined up in my mind like young adult novels on my ratty old grey bookcases, I live stories lined up in many different tenses    dog-eared identities taking place in crises fueled hourglass clocks, if there is one thing I’ll never run ou

My blood is not pure.

Siphoned through custom it puddles as an unholy poison. 

A mixture between castes that courses sin through my veins

Broken tradition seeps through my marrow

and pools black in the hardened pupils of my grandmother

As the years go by and we outgrow our old faces and our old skin and our old identities, 

I wonder to myself if we are really becoming new people at all, 

or if we are simply just accumulating more years and more selves 

It’s not January. It just isn’t. The leaves are green and dance together in hoards above my head, almost mocking me in their togetherness as I shrink into my loneliness.

You ruffled dress.

You lip glossed, 

clean tongued, classy individual.

If time could be measured in words

I would handwrite novels until my knuckles bled

Analyze every single piece written by Steven King twice

Type poems so complex so that the meaning gets lost

Construct every screenplay to give you the ending you deserve

Hours are not spent well in lethargy

nor in deep-seated exhaustion

Hours are rarely spent

more – lost

The boy from the apartment below yours writes you letters about the birds and calls you a sunset.

“Tu sei il sole del mio giorno.” You are the sunshine of my day.

I break down in the supermarket grocery aisles

because I only have five minutes to make the choice

between a variety of granola bars.

I won't remember this in the morning. The way her arm feels wrapped around my shoulders. She is helping me into the car, her car, which is red like mushed up cranberries. The last time I ate cranberries was when I was seven.

mango juice drips from my fingers seeps into the brown dirt dirt that holds roots that reach across countries roots that stitch together centuries roots that spread and cannot be confined mango juice drips from my fingers plunges to the earth earth my mother raced across earth that felt the weigh