By NED BALBO
For my adoptive mother Betty and her siblings
No matter where you vanished, you’re vanished still.
Astonished, pointing out your childhood face,
whatever I felt, I know I always will
By DIANE MEHTA
A sea-gap opens as surf crumbles
onto shifting sediment that pretends to be a beach
but has the bones of 13,000 years;
By TEOW LIM GOH
Ten miles of concrete can bring you
to different places. Your feet carry you
across the ground, let you
When winter set in, they came
to see us with their baby,
a beautiful child about a year old
who was learning to walk
and stepped proudly
across our living room,
waved her fists and hands
and shook her straw colored hair.
It may be cliché to say this now, but how people treat themselves can show you how they treat those closest to them, then other strangers. I often forget to water my flailing herb garden. I often force my body—muscles hard from the lactic acid produced in my anxious panics—to be pleasant to my lovers, who expect pleasantries.
& no one believes the future is horses falling
beneath ten thousand satellites & ten thousand
tombs & who in the new
cities will say through
horses of fire & phosphorous drain
that we could make the journey alone
a temple?
A father is only as good the tree house he never builds
Which he’s promised to his children before
they were script on checkbook, a practiced inheritance
from his father, and his father’s
father.
There’s so many of us here: hood boys taught
discipline through bowing and bare feet, through
knowing the leg is just as much of the punch as
the knuckle.
By ERICA DAWSON
Kool G. Rap said, Cover your head
’cause it’s a dead zone in the red
zone. Rap said, God, now this is ire.
When I was with the bartender,
I didn’t see a field of yellow flowers
when I closed my eyes.
There was no superbloom
the way there’d been with you,
and my heart didn’t burst open
when he put his mouth to my mouth.
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