Catalogue

& i, light as a dry log, would take down cocoa pods, / guavas, bananas, & green mangoes. / & back in the kitchen, she would be there

You try to picture your dad at your height, going down slides at the playground and chasing dogs and learning about multiplication. You think of your mom as a bride, leaving her family behind.

How mysterious and almost divine it feels to be capable of sending through words the understanding of emotions across space and time.

When Mary's swollen belly produced a stone, we wept with her and submerged it underways, so none of us would have to look at it again.

The blob made its way into downtown Arlington, Virginia fixing power lines and removing graffiti all the while. Such decrepitude in infrastructure was not conducive to a good business environment.

Our houses didn't like this man either. We knew the signs of repulsion and fear, the way their siding shivered and shutters clanged shut.

I see her hands cup a grasshopper. I see her sweep with pine needle brooms. Can you smell the lilacs, purple and white?

We glide to the boats on silent waves. Our paddles slicing through the waters. Our war canoes hidden in the darkness of a new moon.

Her toes curling in the sand, Tita counts the shells spiraling beside her. Their bleached bodies, remnants of once-living creatures, wondering if her bones will shine as brightly when she is dead.

She found it in the trash next to a table covered with cards. “You are so mean,” she said.

How I love you in reverse—before taxes and tallness, before towers, and bricks like loose teeth, raining on a parade.

Which is why you whisper the story your mother used to sing before sleep, glow-in-the-dark stars like phosphorescence across the ceiling as you half-dreamed the story about an almost forgotten ancestor, shipwrecked at sea.

Neither Audrey nor Nick could have imagined that after spending decades on the moon, they'd one day be sitting together in a cozy French restaurant in Orlando.

When in Spring semester the breeze from cherry and apple blossoms would blow through the classroom he was first to sense it, and by the wordlessness of his example garnered participation points.

Sometimes I feel like this, like my inside-body is going to pop out of my outside-body, because the inside is too sour to keep in.

The first time I'd held a basketball, I was four, and my Dad had passed it gently to me. In my hands, it was heavy and I dropped it. As it rolled away, I saw people climb up from the lines.

Night after night, I find music in the elegance of sine waves coursing their choral prelude across the display.

The man in an MF DOOM shirt, "El Chacal," was masked: a virus had spread that winter. It will all be over soon, he thought.

I fell into a pile of old wrinkled love poems I had written in youth to a young lady I had a crush on back in undergrad.

This time, we have lunch in Menlo Park, we chase after the morning Caltrain and make it by the last second, and we end up all the way in San Francisco where the sunshine’s the same but the wind feels just a little closer, and cooler.

When we reach out to her, she clasps one of our hands in both of her own. We feel the impression of her fingers on ours long after she has turned away.

The clouds are sparse, and trees shift almost imperceptibly beneath their foliage as if to reject the advances of a late noon breeze. Everything is yellow. A vulture mutes atop a tree.

There was a time when this ship was bright and lively with the business of living. There was a mission.

As a boy I fell inside of a shape. The villagers set out their rescue / pants and sharpened their knives, but who could say what / constitutes dimension?

We scattered the carcasses on the floor and waited. As usual, it felt ridiculous at first, and a couple minutes in we nearly gave up, sure it wouldn’t work this time.

He was gentle and quiet until my hands filled up, then he made me his pushpin...

Will you still love me when I am a worm? I still love you. Your voice rumbling in the darkness / Your song in the morning.

In the girl's first snow—nearly 2 feet—her grandpa held her in a white blanket. What is this? she asks, flipping through her baby book.

I woke to an empty bed and walked outside to find him staring at the sky. “Are we on the moon?” he asked as I came up beside him.

On a June night when the south-westerly monsoon winds bring drizzles to Mahrashtra, my father asks if we must call my grandfather. I immediately agree.

Scientists had shone a light on a squirm with one hand, and pronged them with the other. The worms wound into tight coils.

A whale waits, eager as sin.

Idioms were a topic of conversation but not the reason people spent money on the app. The people on the app were lonely. Twenty dollars an hour was not bad for a cure.

Flames lick his arms and legs like an over-enthusiastic puppy. He’s broken the fire alarm with a broom—

We grab coffee. She’s a physicist. Light is a particle, etching our each encounter on speckled film.

Unprompted, she began rattling off the names and numbers of florists in town: a Rose and a Violet and a Lily, a Daisy and a Jasmine, her head still missing from plain view.

Luk was to be grated with spunk, vigor, anger— you did it fast enough if you clipped your thumb’s knuckle—

i have an impression, deep green: silicon chips bearing microcosm cities, projecting glitter onto a plastic heavens.

He sometimes finds the tops of poles spiking up from the earth, their cracked insulators bleached white like knuckle bones. He marks them on his map. He marks the map again when they disappear.

You eat a whole cherry pie as big as your entire hand. You feel her dance inside you on Sunday afternoons.

I want time. I need soap. The ring is not dirty. It’s stuck. Fingers swell with ennui after marriage.

i learned how to win in four moves at chess. i learned the three segments of every insect’s body. i learned that ms. jacqueline takes her smoke breaks behind the gymnasium and stubs out her cigarette on the oleander petals.

most of us saw what we were looking for, rather than what we found. i take my grape-nuts with instant coffee. now the river is an empty bed of sand.

She gazes into the dark expanse. Outer space. Time occurs in the form of a distant star—a white, shimmering speck. She pinches it between her fingers and pulls.

We’re mooing and braying with laughter, moving in slo-mo, such fun. His little jeans, his striped t-shirt over his drumlike child’s tummy.

There was something calming about the totality of the fog, its constant movement appearing as unchanging stillness. It looked like the landscape of a dream.

An ancient bird broke away from the brigade and snuck in / to watch a film on trees.

Curiously, pieces are in four colors. But always numbering sixteen. Any similarities to pairs of eyes, ears, lips, wrists, breasts, shoulders, hips and legs, also count of sixteen, purely coincidental.

Backstroking across a green screen, the weatherman warns of falling skies and downed power lines. Spleen-shaped hailstones shatter windshields and aviaries.

In his 28th year of research, he met a cow named Cass. Cass was a Braunvieh and her favourite time of the year was late March, when it wasn’t too cold or too hot and the lilies were blooming.

Sometimes this terrified love swooped inches from your face, and you wondered if it would peck your eyes out. Who kept these birds? Why did they?

You could have put in an escalator. Or better yet, you could have invented an elevator. That would have been Exceptional.

at the porch yard, my roommate pokes the brown music of a flower & calls it nectar: / its thick, sugary resin spilling from the white, scented hand of a tulip plant, like wasteful dialect.

I am raised in a vernacular that pays homage to grief & the unceded land of self. / the many acres of the body we held against colonial invasion.

Now the trumpets of battle blare; the castle is under siege. The young queen thinks: the unicorn is me; treasured, trapped but able to see beyond its flimsy cage.

Only in an American pool, did I find myself floating like a leaf baying— what a beautiful thing it is when you drown yourself and come up, a dolphin more, less human.

Here, the pain says and points to my leg like a child unsure of where the Arctic might be on a map.

one out of season morning, we went out looking for a name. We did not know where names make their lairs, whether they favour rock, dirt, twigs, or wires.

A town was a kind of black hole. A street was. A house, a river. People you never saw again were like that, taking a part of you with them, the part of you that you were when you spent time alone with them, and no one else ever knew that part of you existed.

Children here sometimes age in reverse. I once saw a toddler fold into an old man between triage and discharge.

There’s no one else in the beach parking lot. You turn off the engine and the silence rushes in but for the hum in her throat, the tick of the engine cooling.

Structural design: Made of two-by-fours and broken promises, it was built on shifting ground. The burning: After staying silent for so long, you finally find your voice, and your words are enough to set the fire.

At first we kept close track of each unspent word, watching our hoard grow and grow, building more boxes and stacking them higher and higher, full of the unsaid, but always close at hand in case we needed them.

One morning I went into the bathroom to find three hair dryers lined up across the counter. Like I said, the house had accumulated a lot of crap over the years. Who needs three hair dryers?

There should be fairies looking for you. Tie a red ribbon to your bed when you are ready to talk to them.

If Erd can translate either “Earth” or “ground,” does German also have one single word for English “sky” and “Heaven”?

At the school, kids would sometimes sneak looks inside each other's cavities, carefully cracking the little doors open just a sliver, not wanting the animals to escape before full gestation.

I wish I could tell you the dead and gone are younger now, healthier, or stronger, but my impression is that, if anything, they have grown older, smaller, and weaker.

These days, we work with our Glasses, eat with our Glasses, and rest with our Glasses from the safety of the house.