Explore Poems: Home Life

Primero it’s hablando in whatever language
fits your need at the moment.
It’s stories about an unbalanced…

wake up in pre-
dawn Brooklyn,
make water, heat water, squeeze
lemon, crush home-grown (at Joseph’s
on 68th…

Sleep with your face visible so the young will remember you are with them.
You want the others to see…

We burn in daylight but we love the dogs until they
Become stardust again. Like all dogs do, they love…

The gates, the gardens, the windows, the sky, the ledge of  bricks, the fallen leaves, the porch where…

The dentist is now the same
age as me, which is troubling,
mostly because of what I
have and have not done…

For the sake of argument, let’s say
the day my father outlawed all contact
between backhand and face, …

In the sunless hour before day I hear the man I want
to love just how I’d want him. He’ll never let a…

Pain enters through an open window
and you say it is the wind.

It marrows into beams, gutters
walls. Still…

I love cherries.
The fruit, juice, jam,
blossoms, prints on a summer
dress, in a black forest cake…

Consider the market. Consider the gross domestic product of Korea. Call it Kimchi.
Ferment culture in…

The first gun we knew came in a toolbox for the apocalypse: hammer, barrel, crushed can, pack of Newports…

v.
Isn’t it dangerous to be a woman? Surrounded by men, questions
about risk-taking, parenting (I’m childless…

Another word for father is worry.  Worry boils the water
for tea in the middle of the night. Worry trimmed…

But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and...

What looks the ghosts have thirsted for, what love
                                                                               they conceal

            in their deep pails carried up the stairs…

He widens an eye and gets down on one knee.
He accepts a sliver of silver from my mother and kisses
…

It’s Boxing Day and I’m nearly ten and a half.
I got the camouflaged Action Man for Christmas.
I told …

i think what i saw threw me outside the house—i think a hand dipped into the room through the aluminum…

The mothers are weaving their hair & talking about chickens. Iya Jide, who has poultry with twelve …