“Remember when Mom sent us that travel UV, shaped like a dildo?”

“I’ll whisper the end of the love story I started / in 1993 and you can tell me about heaven”

“After watching Black Panther 2 / the man next to me sobs / each inhale heavy”

“ He showed me how to eat a tamarind pod. I told him I’d been drying seeds in the pandemic and asked if tamarind could grow up here. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if they can, it’ll take a couple of years.”

“If you’ve got the cash and can learn to squint your eyes just right, God can be as pink as cotton candy. Hell, God can even bend into a metonym for TV dinners.”

“Can you deny my free will? Can you banish my shadows / silence my echoes, make the person in the mirror disappear”

“At dusk, orphans flock to the abandoned chapel, / an assembly formed by starvation, from scabs & stuttering ribs, / memories of parents slamming doors to ruined flats& the creak of deadbolts in their ear canals.”

Chopin, who, following a lifetime of ill health and heartbreak, died / at age thirty-nine of pericarditis, a painful and sudden disease / of the heart

“we stood at the edge of the cliff, overlooking the sea, / down in Pacifica, remember, near that Fancy Taco Bell, the one / took my sister to for her prom after her boyfriend Rick / drowned down in Santa Cruz”

“one or two / lines from the poem / using slash to indicate line breaks.”

“your feet grow wet / still you kneel / with the net in your palms / fishing for his cracked pieces / moon jellies floating”

“At the store for more dryer sheets, I see someone slide their hand in an O down some other daughter’s ponytail. I know the next part of the joke—he loops it around her neck like a rope. I was a daughter, too, when I learned daughters are always at the hazard of augers.”

“Everyone is getting ready in the falafel restaurant / they let us use for a dressing room.”

“I wish they could see / everything that survived, everything / that came back, like the drooping / head of an untended flower brought / upright by careful attention.”

“ … I wish / I could show them the widening gyre / of debris choking their Pacific Ocean / reduced to a clear-eyed patch of sea / and the countless animals rehomed / there now.”

“to create the correct carmine stain for the soft folds / of a girl’s final dress, her underskirt tied / about her ankles with rope, her slim ankles hidden,”

“I can view magnified a thousand times. / When my daughter asks why we shelter in, / I tell her it’s because dinosaurs sleep”

“You should’ve seen me—my smooth white hips, / the way they slung cold around powder-slick metal, /  the way I whispered Hey there honey, you look so sad in the ears of men waxed with whiskey /  and a taste for mink and plaster.

“I imagine the nudists rising / early to eat cheese, drinkcafé au lait, before / heading”

“from feathers and freckles the sky with constellations. / Morning reminds me how closely we sleep”