“Can you deny my free will? Can you banish my shadows / silence my echoes, make the person in the mirror disappear”

“At dusk, orphans flock to the abandoned chapel, / an assembly formed by starvation, from scabs & stuttering ribs, / memories of parents slamming doors to ruined flats& the creak of deadbolts in their ear canals.”

Chopin, who, following a lifetime of ill health and heartbreak, died / at age thirty-nine of pericarditis, a painful and sudden disease / of the heart

“we stood at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the sea, / down in Pacifica, remember, near that Fancy Taco Bell, the one / took my sister to for her prom after her boyfriend Rick / drowned down in Santa Cruz”

“one or two / lines from the poem / using slash to indicate line breaks.”

“your feet grow wet / still you kneel / with the net in your palms / fishing for his cracked pieces / moon jellies floating”

“At the store for more dryer sheets, I see someone slide their hand in an O down some other daughter’s ponytail. I know the next part of the joke—he loops it around her neck like a rope. I was a daughter, too, when I learned daughters are always at the hazard of augers.”

“Everyone is getting ready in the falafel restaurant / they let us use for a dressing room.”

“I wish they could see / everything that survived, everything / that came back, like the drooping / head of an untended flower brought / upright by careful attention.”

“ … I wish / I could show them the widening gyre / of debris choking their Pacific Ocean / reduced to a clear-eyed patch of sea / and the countless animals rehomed / there now.”

“to create the correct carmine stain for the soft folds / of a girl’s final dress, her underskirt tied / about her ankles with rope, her slim ankles hidden,”

“I can view magnified a thousand times. / When my daughter asks why we shelter in, / I tell her it’s because dinosaurs sleep”

“You should’ve seen me—my smooth white hips, / the way they slung cold around powder-slick metal, /  the way I whispered Hey there honey, you look so sad in the ears of men waxed with whiskey /  and a taste for mink and plaster.

“I imagine the nudists rising / early to eat cheese, drinkcafé au lait, before / heading”

“from feathers and freckles the sky with constellations. / Morning reminds me how closely we sleep”

“to ask if he thought this could be long-term, this safety, / this him. Thank you for eating it before I learned his answer. / And this morning, four a.m., I reach into your mouth, find”

“winter—in under a week. / By now I’ve learned / I can only grow the things “

“Letters, weeks filing past / between them, long-necked like vees / of geese. Which outpost? / Which outpost? You pouring sand”

 “Sometimes  the  mundane things are themost helpful.  A bigger stage and better equipment.  Trajectories and linesof  flight.  More  silence. “

“or they fall out with the barest pressure, when i apply lipstick or when i brush them, when i touch the gum line it gives like bubble yum soft and wet but no stick my mouth a plump soil overrun with hard teeth my words must grow around, i gather them until my mouth is lush, i throw them into the sky like rice at a wedding”