My maman used to work in Hershey, Pennsylvania, as a resident in sneakers and scrubs, wondering what she abandoned to arrive with such hopefulness on this shore. The winds here are chocolate-   smelling, the sweetness of chocolate comes in from the factory, sickens her work. But maman must shore herself up. Tonight she leaves… Read More Sestina for Maman

Héctor1, orador de la gente, caedor de noveno pisos. My mind fast forwards & rewinds, the whirring of a vhs to your last performance. This song, the final note a supposed extension of yourself, a vibrato composed of your multitudes . . .   I didn’t understand how a body could hang suspended between the… Read More Ode to Lavoe

I. Every fifth Sunday, I go to the pharmacy and wait for the nice man in the white coat to get me my birth control. I do this every fifth Sunday because even though it’s ready by Tuesday, I ignore all the CVS courtesy calls and forget to go until I’m out of pills. Every… Read More Birth Control

From William Blake’s “The Rose” and the Collages of Helen Adam   take her petals now, slowly. hold them in your mouth and feel how they yield, melt, twist into insects. some witchcraft cradles you talons first.   some chord within her loses its tune. the rose petals cracked and bore fruit a dark secret… Read More Sickness

I can’t hold the music, but the lines Before me open like a brightened window To a world where quick shimmers Flash like fish, glints of growing gleams, Limbered, swell and swing and begin to spin, and dark shades hum steadfast and steady. I can hear flutes sing from wrinkled verdant perches, Cut with thrilled… Read More I Can Hear It Shining