Equal parts energy and mass, bodies are heldtogether by light. You learn how lightpollutes, dependent on its ability to scatter.The womb gets lighter with every daughteryou have and every daughter you don’t have.Those daughters weigh stones hand overfist before building them into your womblike a ballast or fallen wall.—from “I Ask My . . .
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The man who is about to ask you to marry him grabs the check from the little tin tray and slides the three fortune cookies toward you.“All yours,” he says. You grin and he grins back. Three years together, and you have your rituals, your routines. When you have pizza, he . . .
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As someone who has dealt with immense loss and lives with long-term grief, I cannot say I relish books exploring the topic. Five years after losing our twenty-four-year-old trans son, I am less triggered by storylines dealing with dying young, than I am bored by them. My grief, the steady rhythmic bassline . . .
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She was considered beautiful in the eyes of the common man, but she believed her womanly seduction outweighed her beauty. Yet she would feel guilty as soon as she turned on her charm. First she would pretend she had done nothing wrong, but then she would be gripped by the cardinal sin . . .
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Much of what was happening around the world remained unknown to most people. The vast majority didn’t know anything about it or couldn’t decode the signs of this revolution. In the big cites, the fuses had been lit, and we could smell the sparks coming from Vietnam, the Prague Spring, Bolivia, Chicago, . . .
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Forough Hantooshzadeh Rakhshan believed no sins existed, unless a woman had committed one. That may be why her life had always progressed like a chain of dominos, invariably promising complete destruction with the fall of the first piece, after which she would have to build everything anew. Ever since childhood and into . . .
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After we make love, I think of the word obliterate how it means the destruction of something. I think hostile hands are everywhere. We should probably nail it all shut. I don’t have time to think back to the fourteenth century because too much is tangling roots this day and the day after.—from . . .
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When cleaved of their fur, rabbits look like they do not come from our planet. Perhaps they came to us, bare, from yours. Perhaps some of you came here with these creatures, their muscle and fat smooth around their lungs—the size of thumbs—and their eyes . . .
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Teeth marks are found in the back of a cop car.Cymbals clang on too-hot grits. My mental chatter is at the speed of rabbits thumping.Asphalt tapes the blood spill. A gold tooth crater smiles into . . .
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I’ve checked the box acknowledging that, whatever happens,it won’t be your fault—that my insurance policy will covereverything, except what actually breaks, that you are not responsiblefor any data corruption, any mistakes in my bloodwork results,that your mammogram can only detect so much.—from “Poem in Which I Read the Terms and Conditions,” Volume . . .
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