I’m waiting in Dudley Square / it's late / and a man in his fifties going by / Eliot, walks up to me / tells me about a woman / this crazy woman / and their chance encounter on a stoop in Dorchester

Before the leaving, there is the staying, there are the days of in-betweens, sheltered in the arms of our mother’s mothers.

The tenor of days spent on land that is more water than ground, more magic than science. How during late evenings, in the dying light, our breaths crackle like thunder, and our history moves in everything.

Home would no longer be a place where the leaves would bend to the sound of our names, but somewhere that would come to know our silences.

There is no place we will go that will not know of where we’ve been. There is no place we will go that will not know our songs.

California/
a fire my mind/
entirely a house of cinder in/
a house of cinder

18. A sari, yielding, unfolding, pleat after pleat, will bleat for the reader who could never tell your screams apart from your laughter.

The praying mantis was a sprite. I felt foolish for possessing the ability to speak in the company of this mute universe.

This is what happens when you cut the world in two: