She understands the place she was born into is full of shadows. They slip into her open cracks, slide oozing into the gutters of her ribs, spill against the long, unbroken lines of her legs.

The other day I received my first offer for term life insurance (how are corporations so prescient?), which has the effect of reminding a man he’s going to die, just as a baby has the effect of reminding a man that if he dies, it shouldn’t be for nothing.

I love expectation // beauty subsumed

Why hide? To be found. Why be found?

Bars or no bars, if you did have something worth having, they’d take it, whether you were ridiculous about home security or not.

excuse me this chambray tie / this cummerbund, these plain chops, / these dull lips. I’ve no guilt for gild's sake.

You have found out that someone dies every two seconds. This shouldn’t make you feel better, but it does.

It’s not the contraption itself that I love—this pair of shells of steel and lace—but the woman who measures me and tests my straps as if armoring me for battle.

Why did he shape my brother’s body to the contours of war? Is this the shape of all our language already?

We think that Tinder is just for fun, swiping like in a videogame, like the 1980s game Frogger where the frog hops across the freeway and tries to avoid getting flattened by cars—this is how we feel about dating.

As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

As a witness should I run to her? Make sure she's not suffering a stroke or an aneurysm? I pictured a headline demanding the whereabouts of a witness who'd left the scene of a potential homicide.

You return, at last. / At the edge no longer./ At the margin’s curve no longer. / Circular no longer. / In the embers of unfading foam. / The sputum of inscrutable lava.

my mother leaning in listening / her usual face her yesterday’s face / out cold on the couch

If I had known all boats eventually yield / to the current, I would have readied myself / long ago

By recreating the past, I do not mean going back in a sentimental nostalgic way, but by rebellion and opposition to a world in which we see more and more borders, and walls.

I learned to sleep as light as a new mother, in increments of minutes rather than hours, listening as I dreamed for a rustling of clothing, a knife unsheathed, and then I stopped sleeping altogether.

He never finished a performance without making a prediction. His predictions, if right, would immediately boost his prestige and reverence so much so that when he passed his offering bowl around afterwards people would be more than willing to part with their hard-earned cash.

I'd never felt so sad engraving a trophy before, like I wanted to throw it away when I was done with it.

It's easy in the sense that all you have to do is get in the car and fire up the app. It's hard in that it requires long, monotonous hours to be fruitful, and constant vigilance to stay safe. San Francisco is a tough city to drive.

SAFE Employees make a SAFE railroad. With SAFE employees, a railroad devoid of any mechanical safety devices CAN and WILL be operated safely.

"I've always been interested in the invisible poem. When a poem is finished, what is the undercurrent? What is it still trying to say?"

When you greeted each other / your palms / like embers in cigarette stubs / red and hot / showed from your sleeves

We're not here yet, and still the key aches in the lock. I am leaving, and it's as if I was returning

blame grows small in the moth’s circling / day to day the slightest tooth loosens / a landscape changes until returning by habit

Elsewhere, some later year, I’ll try to be good. Today I don’t care.

I am at my threshold. / The dirt of our daughter. / The mole of her squirming body.

Before I am beautiful I'm in the hairdresser’s chair, / perched atop two phone books, holding my ear. My reflection / in the bathroom mirror is a landscape painting.

Someday I’ll stand speechless / on a grand, forgotten tree of life. // The ornate order of existence / will be my partner, and my partner / will be my shadow // My shadow will be preaching, will be endowed with / all I cannot carry / in this life, // overcome with questions, The tree of life is / not but // total / illumination.

The only Korean word I know is oma,/meaning mother. I sit across from her in the low light of the Korean restaurant/downtown. We hold rice paper menus/up to the candle's glow...

The coroner is piecing together the tale of the pair in his possession. / As if their corpses are jigsaw puzzles laid out on a wooden table...

Dragonflies are like Waze. They predict. They don’t chase after mosquitoes, they intercept them, which means they have to calculate the mosquito’s distance, speed, and trajectory. Dragonflies perform these calculations in milliseconds, far faster than Waze, which always takes agonizing seconds to load as it computes the route, average speed of drivers, and quagmires that might await.