after Bob Hicok
I do not want my mother to die. My mother does not want her mother to die. Her mother does not want her husband to die. Her husband does not want his son to die. His son does not want his daughter to die. His daughter is too young to pronounce death, let alone decipher it. Three days later, when her grandfather will die, she’ll be braiding her doll’s hair. Thirty-six years later, when her father will die, she’ll be looking, with ocean eyes, at her six-year-old daughter braiding the hair of her doll. Three days later, tired of the doll, her daughter will ask her the question she did not ask her mother: where do they go? She won’t know what words to put in her mouth, so she’ll leave her mouth open. She’ll chew on it all night. Nobody wants to go somewhere they can’t return from, do they? But then, who wants to go so far only to return? My father cuts the strings of kites when they’re way up in the sky. The world is full of kites like these.
First Published in Rattle, 2022
SELECTED POEMS
Whalelore
TAB Journal, 2024
The Good Life Review, 2024
(Immortality) of the Alphabet | Lessons in Archeology
december magazine, 2024
HOAX, 2024
Lizard | right behind you | remains of the house
The Offing, 2023
A braid of unknowing I tie before you
North American Review, 2023
The Maine Review, 2023
Things with which we foul the Ganges
Cincinnati Review, 2023 (Nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Best Spiritual Literature)
Denial Dances on a Moonless Street in the Arms of Blame
Midway Journaal, 2023 (Winner of the 1000-Below Prize)
Colorado Review, 2023
There is no time here
Bellevue Literary Review, 2023 (Editor’s Choice Honorable Mention for the John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry)
Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2023
Banshee Press, 2023
sleep fragments
since he refuses to speak
I observe him sleep
the whole experience is akin
to crossing an ocean
walking on a bridge of stones
except it's not stones it's electricity
and the ocean's not an ocean
but your father's soul
a ten-inch mattress
rests on the floor
(the bed too far
off the ground for me)
beside ma's divan
uneasy as time he moves
from one side to another
ever changing
his position like Jupiter
one could be so restless
only in a body
they wish to escape
my voice is your voice
my empty chair your empty chair
my budding bald spot your bald head
my wakeful sleep your wakeful sleep
*
what if all these poems about you
are a film losing everything
good about the book
*
the Jupiter of his body collides
with the divan
one afternoon I reveal he hums in his sleep
there is no one who does not
some babble others sing gospels
*
perhaps if we said please
please rain please Tuesday
please sleep
no alcoholic steps into the same sleep twice
is a poem beginning
there was a time my father
or a poem fashioned from his insomnia
a portrait of the father or the poet
or both or neither
*
so glad your snores are yours
night an orchestra of insects
sleep an abandoned hall
*
you've got to be a ceiling fan to understand any of this
all dreams memory after waking
all words law after believing
*
the body bleeds out the night's undoing
here we are again awake he murmurs to himself alive
First publishing in The Ocotillo Review, 2023
adda, Commonwealth Foundation, 2023
‘I Am’ is a sentence, ‘You are’ is not
Poetry Online, 2023
There are 51 descriptions of you on the wall so far
The Ex-Puritan, 2023
tug of war between whisper and rumor
Frontier Poetry, 2023
Portrait of a Father as an Alcoholic
Rattle, 2023
My childhood & its scent of a bird caressed
Finalist for the Literary Taxidermy Award, 2022
The Table
Plume Poetry, 2022
Rattle, 2022 | Ledbury Poetry Prize Honorable Mention, Selected by Anthony Anaxagorou
Winner of the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, 2021, Selected by Mark Doty, Nominated for the Pushcart Prize
What it is is what it is not and what it is not is what it is
Winner of the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2021
This one’s barely about him
At times I feel their voice like the fingers
of a pickpocket in my coat. Unlike police,
they witness crimes, scrounge
for fruit flesh, piss in quiet
corners, play in parks to kill
time. I trip over the first-person
every morning going for a run,
extract each metaphor like
a rusted nail from my shoe, eye the voice
fall from a nest sewn into the yellow flame
of an ashoka branch. I flee the rest,
leave rat poison in my car
at sunfall. They do not die,
by midnight smuggle
in through the only window, lie
all over each other, weep. Last week,
one was trapped naked in the lift
while trying to find the rest,
couldn’t leave until morning
when the sweeper rescued it.
My poems do not have a house.
My father does not allow
them inside. Hunchbacked,
coal-skinned, skinny,
two/two-and-a-half feet tall,
they do not deserve mirrors
in his eyes. They roam
over foam-rot city sewers,
rub shoulders with rikshawallahs.
Street dogs chase them. Some crouch
in crumbling mosques that line the lips
of Delhi. Others huddle beneath the bells
of old crowded temples. All smoke
the black words in letters never posted.
Now it fears closed places,
refuses to sleep in the car, lays
on the corner of the road that is mostly holes,
my old gym t-shirt its bed. A witness
to its will to live, I nurse it
and the others every night, grant rain
through the radio to allow
them dreamlessness. Upon waking,
they attempt to find an end
but instead of periods
return with a language composed
entirely of commas, a question mark,
and a broken parenthesis. My father again
dispels them. Again, we cobble
a home from his screams.
First Published in Poetry Ireland, 2024