Alice Chu lives in Chongqing and she attends classes online loves hotpots and her friends never submits work on time can’t follow essay instructions but she speaks perfect English and writes crystalline sentences a potential poet or a novelist but her father has other...

Post Break-up Souvenir Shopping, Naples   No to the limoncello, liquid sunshine in hand-painted glass bottles. No to the porcelain-handled pizza cutters poised to slice a pie. Nope to the floral-print tablecloth/napkin sets, nope to Deruta pottery blue-rimmed...

my mother dreams of taking off in a hot air balloon, not exactly flying but rising, a slow-motion escape fueled by the hiss of flame parachute silk and her breath- held longing to be lifted from ground   she collects postcards and prints of antique airships and...

The day as white as snow reversed The gash in the boy’s chin-flesh reknit The starling sucks its song back into its head   The fire net door quiets to static nothing The moth rises from dust toward the turncoat beacon A spark flies away   Alto notes return...

Bells clanging      clang clang, crunching rocks      underneath these feet, chirping      birds chirping      crickets, silence masks its own noise,      a white noise, hostile      eggshell      cream colored-noise   There are       so many subjects that are   ...

You mourn yesterday’s bare branches when not a single cherry blossom was on them. The silent neighbor who takes slow walks, where is he? You can’t get over their absence, how they settled into your invisible calendar, tracked life   so you didn’t have to ponder...

Keeping Score   The score 983 to 735 he’s quite a bit ahead (as you can see) 46 points for washing my car 52 for buying me flowers minus 10 because slightly wilted I lost 66 points when I called him fuck face after he watched four hours of women’s beach...

When I turn 70, I am embracing vices like a newly-discovered, long-lost twin, like an adolescent puppy love, vices I avoided all my life out of fear, abundant caution and good common sense. I will smoke cigarettes like Bogart and Garbo— seriously, mysteriously,...

Mesmerizing horizontal snow on Halloween, a weather record for Chicago accumulation--   Chicagoans are unpredictable, too, when they observe Halloween, putting on masks when they sit in bars dressed in orange and black, sip Betteljuice Cocktails, tout toy lasar...

(for the cashier at Brookline Booksmith who told me Carlo Rovelli was the best author in the whole bookstore, which felt like a stretch although I liked the book.)   I believe   Before Anaximander the world was flat and ringed by a river called Ocean,  ...

In response to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things.   If William Tell’s arrow missed and the child was struck almost clear through the head, his hat would look like the one on this wall, crown pierced instead of the apple. Take that...

Bombed apartments lie open, windows shattered, spears of jagged glass, broken teeth biting into vacancy. Torn net curtains flap, wave, signalling into emptiness. No neighbours to spy on No secrets to conceal. In flattened playgrounds twisted slides, slaughtered...

FRAMED …for my father   To love a person with Alzheimer’s is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten. - Arne Garborg   He spent years in the basement at war against forgetting. Scissors and tape were his weapons, the conflict...

I take in a terrific piano concert: classic ragtime, boogie-woogie, rhumba-boogie from New Orleans, a couple of blues numbers. Professor Longhair tribute. A boogie version of the national anthem; it never sounded better.   The pianist’s fingers blur; from his...

when moonlight bathes the cold marble of your headstone, do you cling to the echoes of old laughter? what burdens sleep in the final exhale? you, where the tiger lilies won’t bloom and songbirds fill spaces we cannot see you go can you tell me if a holy hand found...