Poems

Flight Number 182 Ashes Over The Atlantic (The Kanishka Air India Bombing, 1985) There’s a hollow in the morning sky, split wide by jet engines and time zones,Where prayers stitched by mothers unravel at thirty-one thousand feet,above the static and drone,A June sunrise catches the silver hull, gleaminglike a wish carried west across the curve […]

Flyover Country They call it flyover from the coasts and he has heard the term,He calls it home and he does not let the insult confirm,Any feeling of inadequacy about the place he chose to stay,The flyover country feeds the coasts three times a day. Flyover country, that is where the wheat comes from,Flyover country,

FineThey ask me at the door, the counter, the desk, the passing hall—fine is the correct dimension of what lives between us, that’s all,fine is not a lie exactly, fine is the appropriate answerfor the format: the thirty-second social scan, the dancer’squick turn at the barre before the music asks for more—fine keeps the conversation

Five Minutes In The Driveway She answers every two a.m. call like she invented the concept of being thereFolds other people’s crises into something manageable with her bare handsand a voice like steady weatherNobody asks what she does with the wreckage afterNobody thinks to askMeasures everything now — sleep, sugar,the precise distance between fine and

Flat Tire on the Road to Anywhere Pulled over to the gravel with a slow leak in the wheel,the kind that doesn’t blow out, just deflates until you feelthe handling go soft and the ride goes from bad to worse —a flat tire on the road to anywhere, in the universe. He’s been sitting with

FilamentSkin like lit phosphor.Curves I memorized.Can’t unknow the wanting.Can’t unsee her eyes. The pillow still holds her—faintest trace of sweat.Every nerve a filamentin a circuit she has set. I’m burning at three a.m.,no sleep, just flesh and ache.She left her scent across my bedand I’m wide awake. Hips that rolled like whiskey,slow pour, deliberate.The dress

Fine, Let It Burn (Revised)The fire alarm chirps once. Twice. Then flips its switchand screams through the hallway like a demon with a rent bill and no patience.Smoke slides under my door in lazy ribbons, soft as theft,while the paint blisters and the shadows stand up tall like they want a crowd. I could grab

Feast Of FliesMore.That’s the whole sermon. More wine, more noise, more skin, more time.More of the thing that didn’t fix it last time.Pull up another chair to the table of never enough—the feast goes all night,and the night goes till it doesn’t. He eats like a man who’s afraid the food will leave him.Drinks like

Fever at the MeridianMidnight peeled away like skin from fruit,and the sheets became a furnace, cotton burning at the root,her silhouette still pressed into the dark behind my eyes,the phantom weight of hipbones and the salt between her thighs. Concupiscent and restless, I am ruined by the thoughtof the hollow at her collarbone where perfume

Faultlines In The Bones (Haitian Earthquakes, 2010 & 2021) There’s a clockless hour in Port-au-Prince,thick with the iron perfume of dust and rain,Where the last rooster crows atop a roof made of rags and blue tarpaulin pain,You can hear the hymn of the living digging by candle, hands blistered raw,Cursing the way cement falls heavier