When we were girls, we weren’t supposed to look adults in the eyes, and when we did, we could barely stand the intensity, felt like we were too close to a human kind of flame.

I got my period two days ago but tell him I’m pregnant anyway.

The heavy door slammed like the hatch of a submarine before descending under water.

Tokador. When I say the word, there’s hesitation in my voice that I can’t help as soon as the first consonant leaves my tongue.

Jenny’s first change, like everybody else’s, was expected.

O bobolink. The bobolink is dead / at my door — found leaving my apartment / to school then to work. After some searching, / I guess it’s a bobolink—this lemon- / headed crow, this crumpled parachute cloth.

When I got the phone call the third time Daveonte was shot, I knew it was the last. Still, I held my breath.

Busted furniture. Building materials. Car guts. Then a few feet away, loads more: old clothing, broken toys, soiled diapers.

He’s figured it out. The only way out is to swim, to break water, to surface. It is a long way up, that is how far we have drowned.

We come from the mountains, we have wolf / in our blood, we have pinebarb.

Make it out to my sense of melodrama or maybe just my consistent need for I think it's called attention?

& so I hear / in the beginning I am not / 12 & I hear hips swinging a wide bridge / a chorus swelling in the bass / of my chest & I break

Are there times where we can’t compromise our beliefs because to do so would be to forfeit the core of our beings?

Hers is a country of dead people. All those graves scattered over the hill, the white crosses, the angels with their hands on their chests, the pinwheels that spin over children’s graves.