writer’s notebook #3 Across the backyard, I want to shout: Come inside and let me wrap your hands In lotion and soft socks. I can see them turning Red against the brown and weak green. Let me bring a towel for your mud-soaked boots, And let me make you a cup of tea. Let me Pretend you are only…

afterparty You wake up to a mouse sniffing The damp cloth of your T-shirt, Barley overhead shaking its Head over your bruise-soft body. Mind shifts to the dirt underneath, Covered by a quilt. The quilt is Pilled, scratching the backs of your Ankles. You feel weak. His Grandmother is searching for…

Forklift. Water. And White Boxes Original by Fish Lu, translation by Xi Nan Friday, 11 June. A forklift appeared on the morning street, entered my sight. It moved slowly, steadily forward, making a heavy (dull) sound. The forks did not lift cut stone, nor cement stacked into a cube. The forklift…

Mother Original by Fish Lu, translation by Xi Nan My mother has died. This sentence holds at least three meanings: 1. I will never see my mother again. 2. I am a person without a mother. 3. Now "mother" for me is nothing more than a word. This is a reprint of work originally published in The First…

The First Time I Ate Saury Original by Fish Lu, translation by Xi Nan It was my first time eating a saury, but not for Xi. The saury was ready. There was only one of it. We thought there would be many. In the hot summer, a saury was lying across the plate, slender and sharp, like a dagger. I…

Encircled In Tromsǿ I lie as in a luge, aligned with the meridian, my feet pointing due North, ready to plunge. There are more yarn stores than we have Starbucks. Everyone is young. The only fat people are tourists. My aurora app pings five times an hour. All that going on above the rainclouds.…

The Maid’s Ledger The hotel has been standing longer than the city admits. It rises from the block like a kept secret, all velvet rot and gilt remorse. Its name has changed three times—each syllable peeling off like old wallpaper, but the women who clean it do not change at all. My mother scrubbed…

Exhalation The reef knows the ocean the way our bodies know breath. Water enters coral's thousand doors, carrying plankton, carrying the small drifting things that sustain it. The coral does not ask for the ocean. The ocean simply arrives at its porch, then leaves after completing its work. Breath…

Borrowed Skin I confess: I used you. I entered first love with trauma: my cells undone, each membrane pulled from its nucleus, gasping. So I turned to you, my friend. I wore your patience like borrowed skin, let your touch stitch my bones together. But your love was wintry light. I felt no heat.…

Reclamation For one year I was only a chalk outline, something the baby could erase. I pumped. I leaked. I offered. I disappeared into the mouth that needed me. I woke, slept, and woke again. I disappeared into the body that called for me. I want to be opened again, to feel the weight of hands…

My son The forest gives him to me in installments—first his weight and length, then the way his head finds the space between my breasts. The curve of my neck cradles where his skull is not yet closed, a temporary architecture. He roots for my breast, traveler from some other place. The giants in…

Still Here The orchid I meant to throw out months ago, stalk collapsed against the bathroom mirror, bloomed while I was away. Four white petals, thin as rice paper. Then six. Then a whole row opening, drinking light I didn't know was there. The petals, so fragile and white. The kind of white that…

Leather daddy I stopped having random panic attacks shopping at Costco. I don't feel anxiety about trying to find a parking spot and accidently ramming my car into the random cement pillar in the center of the top floor parking lot. Instead of rushing to get in and out of the building, I purposely…

Home for the Holidays I'm on the road But have no destination Born in the Scottish Highlands, Robertson Tait writes romantic comedy and suspenseful contemporary stories featuring gorgeous, confident heroines, imperfect but sensitive heroes, and intriguing locations described with a strong sense of…

If a deer could go to war Eira goes to battle today. Antler-less, she reports to the field, unfastening from the trees. In the cold her shape fidgets into nothingness: soon, she will forget body and air. But first, let me tell you about her commission. Today she is whole & hooved; she will…

Interstice, In Transit i. my hands clench the pole i am holding myself together like the metal chains connecting trains, i look at the do not walk between cars sign i have always been too broke to pay attention. in the reflection of the train car door i am someone i almost recognize ii. i don't…

Stillness, Centrifugal The psychiatrist asked at my screening if I had any hobbies. My twelfth birthday, I said, I planted three marigold seeds in bitten ground. Still. Three things to my name slept under frost. I talked about the climb—hands on ankles, the mountain facing backwards, this is how…

Pressing on My Asphalt Knees Tears fall like leaves in the cold nights of October. I mail my friend an annotated Lonely Planet of Guatemala. I am stuck in metaphors and with fears of leaving the oven on. I think of the courts that employed fools in the 1500s. I would have been a good fool...or…

How to Read a Menu (after Mary Douglas) I. When I lived in Germany, I refused to learn the language, refused to speak the language so I watched people while I dined outdoors at a Thai restaurant, the chef and waitstaff recognized us we tried to speak in English One day I sat facing a blonde German…

Geography Lessons You and I, our story really is about moving, boxes packed with books every move, piles and piles scattered just today I couldn't find Playing in the Dark You led us to the cities and countries I followed to talk to you I learned a language I hated and now everyone thinks I'm a…

An Eyelash Wish To wish for something without color is strange. A fish jumps towards the movie screen & out of the fishbowl. Lungs expand & pistachio crumbs. Two young girls twirl pollera skirts. Ants hike up a bedroom window—twenty-two & eudialyte. Palindromes. Orange juice drips from your chin…

A Woman from PopaYork* She bought a bag of ripe lychees and a cup of lime-bathed mango slices from the boy humming under a blue tarp by the side of the dirt road, and at the domino club the next day, she thought of his scratched hands peeling ribbons of red-orange skin as his crisálida1.…

The Storm’s Wife The tinny voice on the battery-operated radio called it a once in a lifetime storm. People said they were exaggerating. People also took precautions, because you could feel it in the air, the potential before the kinetic. The sky was the color of static. The grocery store had a…

(July 2) My Continuous Dream of Vehicular Manslaughter In every ending there is a bloody death in which the brakes stop working or I make a terrible mistake, confusing green with red, left pedal with right. My aunt yells when I cross my legs in the passenger seat so now I dream of crunch limbs…

Warrior Wound I walk away from you in a long dress and think that it means something. To you I am a blur of gingham only getting further away. Later I almost get hit by a motorcycle. I am high and you told me to live a little. You cry over spilt milk I cry for a Grandfather, almost curly hair, the…

Abecedarian Actually I am not at peace with the broken pavement, lost packages, cut cuticles that tells me sickness haunts even the good. Dogs make me cry in the library and because we have lost each other (April May etc.) this is my problem. Funk, in a funk my mother says, just like when the sun…

my anorexia speaks in old latin (bo bis bit) i know every tense of hunger and she knows me, new jersey, and purple walled bedrooms with a giraffe on the bed. (kid, teen, child, girl, young) everywhere i go i am sick and bilingual. tired and practicing my verbs. eat to eat to be eaten to starve to…

i swallow a cherry pit and i grow a cherry tree in my appendix i swallow a cherry pit and the boy from third grade brushes his teeth and says he likes me i swallow a cherry pit and my mom tells me like can mean different things i swallow a cherry pit and the cherry tree burst from my stomach i…

Half Return i imagine when we end, we will part beneath the banyan tree, its milky-sapped limbs weeping red figs into the fecund earth. there was always something backwards about us / always, we return here. roots that grew downward from nodes. the skies were never a possibility for us. throats…

Reflection in the Fire I wake to light knocking at the door where I stuff rags into the cracks to keep the dark in. The animals that live inside me crawl out one by one, glistening with the afterbirth of dream, gangly and uncertain in the world they've been forced into. They watch from odd &…

Vasayan: Once Pirates, Now Nurses A nurse with pirate blood means crossing picket lines after the hospital started bonusing scabs for showing up. A nurse with pirate blood means 7pm to 7am shifts for the overtime, $3 extra an hour, and sleeping wedged in the restroom stall so no one could see your…

Midnight ride past EXIT 23 a green canvas, framed in white, promising directions to towns that don't ask my name EXIT EXIT EXIT EXIT but the road doesn't answer and neither do I there is no exit only the mile continuing past where home should be not tonight Ryan Wade Biller is a recent graduate…

Homesick "Nature is not a place to visit. It is home." —Gary Snyder Take me back hard earth. Take me back lily pad and ant crawling over the warm summer rock, living life with no grief, no thought of such suffering. Take me back switchgrass much taller than I, and black fly who has landed on the…

The Doves For M The doves clutch to the rail of the balcony and call to you— They coo, they coo, they call to you to climb down off the ledge, to offer your shaky palms overflowing with seeds— The doves clutch to the rail of the balcony, and call to you— Ahrend Torrey is the author of This Moment…

The Winter Garden The roots remember what the sun once murmured through the hidden year; they hold the cold like something won, a vow the sleeping earth can hear. The garden keeps what we let fall— the breath we spent, the names we kept. It gathers them beneath it all and holds them where the seed…

1414 West Susquehanna For Matthew There was his collection of important miscellanies stowed in the closet–though no one found any signs of Merlin or unicorns. Instead, the smell of bleach mixed in with excrement—his stepbrother could not erase the evidence, but he did try to disinfect it. There…

Home Is a Rhythm from Home Is a Rhythm Home is not coordinates. It's percussion in the chest. It's Spanish shouted across shotgun houses. It's brass bands mourning and celebrating at the same time. It's brown skin sweating through Mardi Gras, pride louder than doubt. New Orleans raised me without…

Spoken Word for the Undocumented Heart from Home Is a Rhythm They call me illegal— as if existence requires approval. But jazz was once undocumented. So was blues. So was survival. I am unwritten history refusing erasure. I speak with the voices they taught to whisper. Every poem is a document.…

Immigrant Saints from Home Is a Rhythm We pray to saints who understand paperwork delays. Candles flicker like promises we're not sure the government will keep. Hands scarred from labor fold without complaint. Faith smells like sweat, like cement dust, like hope mixed with fear. My father kneels…

Black, Brown, and Breathing from Home Is a Rhythm In New Orleans, race is a rhythm you feel before you name it. I learned early who gets questioned, who gets forgiven, who gets buried with hashtags. Black pain taught me proximity. Brown skin taught me precarity. We share sidewalks, share looks…

Report Card from Home Is a Rhythm "Smart, but distracted," the teacher writes in red ink, as if my mind were wandering, isn't carrying history. I memorize presidents who never spoke my language. I read textbooks that forget people like me built the city after it drowned. At home, my parents speak…

Zydeco Baptism from Home Is a Rhythm The accordion pulled me in like it knew my bloodline. Creole rhythms met my cumbia in the middle of the floor, no passports required. Sweat baptized us all. I learned that culture isn't pure— it's blended, pressed together by necessity and joy. My body learned…

Café con Beignets from Home Is a Rhythm Powdered sugar fell like false innocence onto everything it touched. Abuela stirred coffee dark as migration routes, sweetened only by faith. Tourists bit into beignets and called it culture. We bit into long hours, low wages, high hopes. I watched myself…

Hurricane Spanish from Home Is a Rhythm Katrina didn't knock. She kicked the door in. Water swallowed memory faster than we could pray. The TV spoke English. The helper spoke Spanish. Fear translated poorly. My mother clutched documents like they were flotation devices. Forms asked questions that…

Brown Boy on Bourbon Street from Home Is a Rhythm Bourbon Street smells like sugar and sin, like regret poured over ice. Tourists wear my city like a costume— purple beads, drunk smiles, borrowed accents. They call me amigo with mouths full of entitlement, like friendliness erases power. I mop…

Second Line, First Language from Home Is a Rhythm I learned English from the way trumpets bend grief into gold, from pastors preaching salvation through busted megaphones, from streets that talk back when you step wrong. Mama said, escucha, because New Orleans speaks before it explains. I learned…

I’ve been going to all of the mass shootings in Michigan this year for a poetry journal, writing poems about the mass shootings, because I'm an idiot, I guess, and it just hit me as something I should do or needed to do, because my cousin has a bumper sticker he made himself that says Michigun,…

I have left the house to find myself, within minutes, in a car crash where, later, at the hospital, they will say, We're sorry, there is nothing we can do for your neck, and I have left the house to find, upon return, that she is naked on the bed with a lingerie that I can only say is goddessmade…

Differently I heard the ocean then differently. I was a young teen traveling with the two. Watching them love as I would love. The night windows allowed in salt air salt smell. I heard the rush of receding waves. I learned safety in the white board house. It would be for a short while. I heard the…

June blooms… June blooms on the Christmas cactus; Even the smallest buds require practice. Among Daniel Tobin’s many books are The Mansions, winner of the National Indie Excellence Award, and Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Other awards include…