Poetry |
“The Holy Embraces the Holy”
“The chaplain was Muslim, Ali, // and the patient was not that kind of Texan. / ‘If only more Muslims were this nice, / the world would be a better place,’ / the transplanted lone-star said to me. // Leaning against the wall, hands behind my back, / I nodded in cold agreement.”
Essay |
“Trash”
“That afternoon, I wrote on the board: Lucille Clifton said she wanted to write a poetry that would comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Poetry |
“Even Birds Leave the World” and “My Cloak of Not Knowing”
” … I knew I could spend / a lifetime not knowing how sorrow had become my second skin, / and that no matter how far I traveled, the sky would be the same / though disguised by different weathers.”
Essay |
“The Tiny Thread of Milk”
“My own body briefly remembers what it cannot, a time before I tasted language or knew the parts of speech, in my earliest days of naps and waking at midnight and a belly full of milk.”
Poetry |
“Slow Seed”
“Listen to a nurse tell how she holds a phone for hours / as dying patients FaceTime family. / Twenty in four days. / Tell me how she does this.”
Poetry |
“Make Your Home in the Imperfect Present” and “Two Stones”
“How many times have you awakened / to one more stage rehearsal / for the main event // that never seems to happen?”
Poetry |
“Twelve,” “Conduit” and “Permit me to write my own ending”
“Someone was in the house, in my room I tell the police. The summer / I turn 12, standing in the kitchen Karate Kid cocky. Fingers wild // with popsicle juice & the murder of flying ants, their bodies burst cranberry / on the wood parquet …”
Fiction |
“The Unnaming” and “War Story”
“A vortex of air had trapped the bird within the flag — the same flag our mother received after our father died in that faraway country.”
Essay |
“July, August” and “Maybe Tomorrow or the Day After”
“I’ve found many good books. A book on how to garden, circa 1970. A book on country drives to take and why you might. A book of the history of a little town nearby, the one with so many stone walls.”
Poetry |
“Or What Else Could We Do But Raise Our Hands?”
“… when silt, dust, / shards, erase boundaries, words / break down, and scattered letters / run wild in search of meaning // we raise our hands …”
Essay |
“Sitting for Mrs. Siegfried”
“Achieving those symmetrical pigtails meant sitting under the blow dryer, its shrieking motor barely muffling my mother’s expletives as she brushed my hair limp.”
Poetry |
“February in Deep Melancholy” and “Morning”
“She’s calling from a great distance. / The bulbs are coming back! The ones we ripped out! / They’re coming back! She’s moving around, / speaking quickly between things.”
Poetry |
“Having You”
“… partly because of your hanging back on your heels to my pushing / ahead on my toes, yes, / partly because of that I am free to push ahead …”
Poetry |
“Letter to Time,” “That Kiss” and “All Told”
“Let me say it again: / do not come back and hang out in my garden. / You’ll frighten the children / and the leaves will fall – I’ve seen it happen.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Michael Torres
“I wanted to write something that pushed back against my own work, and I just went after stereotypes that I wrote with, or through, or into, because I wasn’t sure how to navigate the white gaze back then, and which we don’t learn how to break out of until we get further in our craft.”