Those stories of activists remain / stories, leaving me to wonder / if wings are quixotic things that only get you pinned

Yet what I fall into when I throw myself wholeheartedly into friendships with elders is not time’s scarcity, but its abundance

cratered once-oceans / looping the lunar / phases, playing our faces / on shuffle, no [[ agents ]] to label us / illegal

i name a thing & occupy its territory. i hear / glory, is to kill this image with the sound of hooves

With a soul, we are about 8 degrees warmer / than without one.

Be grateful inside the storm. You are our perfect audience. You are flesh blended into machinery.

Earth pocked by shrapnel / and fallen fruit. Heavy trees, intent / on still giving.

I gather that I must have descended from lesbians; fated for an existence of a certain longing only known to lullabies trembling over oceans.

How your body can stay very still while your mind climbs out through the ceiling.

the pleasure of letters and butter and lobsters, nestled / in linen, unable to answer, the pleasure of curtains, / their sun-dappled shadows

It was him who decided the consequences. These consequences still live in my body.

the people will not choke the people will choke. the future is a magic eight ball.

Dainty was she, with pistols and desert roses / in the dune mosques of the Sahel that foretold her safeness.

Sometimes we cried from exhaustion, the unknowns of the pandemic, and the suffocating feeling of loving a person so much you wanted to climb into their mouth.

You had no intention of ringing the bell, acting as if nothing had happened, as if five years were enough time to fill the emptiness she left behind.