MLR

When I think back on my years as a graduate student at Homewood University in Baltimore, I’m struck by how

Picture a convict in an orange jumper. He sits in shade beneath a banyan tree, legs lotus- & buddha-like, a

Cable falls, pipe cracks, terracotta caves on sewer pipes descending the hill like a snake with its skin ripped apart

Neither of us takes it out anymore since I discovered their affair, the coffee mug she’d sent him. He’d lay

We fall through the eye of David Bowie the day I have you. You swirl out of me and pull

Growing up in the 1980s and 90s with an absent father and an in-over-her-head mother, TV became my co-parent. My

1. Circle Life na wheel, e dey spin, Sometime e smooth, sometime e thin. We waka dey go, no be

Check under the trash bag you swore to take out yesterday. Press your ear to the fridge; its hum might

My father tells me to make a turn and drive down a narrow alley, and there, in the town a

She is amazed to find herself in the Hirshhorn— amidst works that are the last word, for now, in contemporary

The Archbishop of Chicago is dead, and my mother watches the funeral live on Channel 7. I’m also in the

I dreamed I changed my name because the other one ran out, but I don’t know my new name When

  1973

Little Red Riding Hood and a little wicker basket of bread and strawberry jam. Big black wolf slaps a

Initially, you pinch its crotch— Gralove—an ester, rictus flowing, juice of the rose. Everlasting Love, she's named. To save her,

Some old lady, she calls herself. She is old and a lady, but the moniker is camouflage. Marianne has mystique.

Scan the expanse, where the difference between land and sky can scarcely be discerned. Both abundantly pink. Both deafeningly silent.

Cramped duplex, snarled weeds. A woman drinks tea. Blood from her chapped mouth smears the lip of her cup. She

It was a quarter past twelve and the Greyhound bus Porsha had been sitting on for half an hour, the

The poem “Fingerspitzengefühl on the Japanese Te-form” at the end of this essay is a linguistic mishmash. It was originally

I thought he might be having a stroke when I came home to find him slurring his words. After he

What ended up on the table began on the side of the highway. but you of all people know that

“There is no smallest among the small and no largest among the large,

but always something still smaller and something

Not even a casual glance

from the manta ray slowly gliding by.

Solitary, majestic, fins billowing

softly like sheer

After sharing my poetry

at the literary salon,

I mingle with the crowd,

sign books, make small talk.

“Great