Okay, Charlie, relax. You need to calm down. This is what you're gonna do: You'll fix yourself a cup of chamomile first and pop a Xanax. Then you'll light a relaxing candle, sit down, turn on the TV, and pretend you saw nothing-just until Jignesh pays the rent. That woman is dead; a few days more inside the freezer can't hurt her. Then, and only then, you will call the police.

Submerged in bed, she kept his attention, slowed his breathing, stilled his thoughts, narrowed his senses to a steady state, focused on thin blade of shoulder, pale crook of arm, valley below cheekbone, sharp ridge of lip. He wanted to bathe in her, wanted to toss their togetherness around in great handfuls. Wanted to eat the light on her skin, drink her sheen of sweat. Wanted to smoke the smell of their sex, roll it up and set it ablaze.

This ain't quite memorial

For Kenneka, Nia, Tee Tee, Chynal, Kayla, Toyin & all our kin

the heaviness in my chest knows

safety an illusive myth

every reflection in this world

is a ghost

A girl is gone and I see myself

in the shine on her lips.

She was perhaps less jaded.

or more daring. or thrown to risk

without choice. But she is gone

all the same and I feel the absence

of her smile in the way

my bed refuses to let go

each mourning.

My boss tells me it's embarrassing that I've been here for six years and I'm still at Goldfish status. Ever since we installed the gamification plug-in, he knows exactly how many Likes I've gotten from coworkers, exactly how many Comments I've made, exactly how many Best Answers and Virtual Pints of Beer I've received, exactly how many Blog Posts I've posted. He even knows how many animated cat GIFs I've giffed, which is zero. We get points assigned to these various activities and are assigned a status level based on our points. I'm a Goldfish even though some six-monthers have already leveled up to Penguin. My boss is a Blue Whale.

What represses unhomes in the sound

Who has made me what is made me

Is a voice just muscles and shape and

Breath to phrase a song boats assemble

At the mouth of the harbor mouth in

Earth you who wrote an ode to silence

Never wrote of what is silenced I did

Seek all resounding caves let the voice

Be lit all the lanterns in the new world we

Need the language of stone from string

To string quiver in the opening the garden

So beautiful Lucifer dark sun of morning

No Eden but innocence no expulsion

But after

from The Voice of Sheila Chandra

Not a scrap but a square, the size of a woman's handkerchief. A square of paper, small and white, pinned against the underside of an iron grate beneath Ellen Portinari's feet-detained there by an updraft of cool air, its scent moldy, metallic: Eau de Subway.

All but blank, that square. Its sole markings a few numbers printed by hand.

John Henry Sleeping in High Grass

Mowers miles away, mud flies on top

his hammer like they own it, his chest

cresting and falling in shapes shifting

between sunlight and leaves, black steel

his destiny, John is motion at rest,

tides of moon and waves in still waters,

suns igniting hearts of molten iron,

a hardened conviction, rose petals in rain.

Sleep is a dream, the real world a poundage,

work a sentence for being his mama's son,

the hammer in his crib, the supernatural

a drum song of woodpeckers, cow bells

in the field, heaven a home going back to

a place before the bugle call to be born.

from Spirit Boxing

"He can't see the kill but waits for the lumbering flight that follows, the extra muscle required in the wings, the dangling silhouette of a lifeless tail or paw or head skimming just above the trees. When at last he lowers the glasses, his face is calm and solemn as if to say, That's why.
And she wants to gather him into her arms then, to close his green eyes with kisses, to smooth the cool heel of her palm against his unsuspecting brow. Instead, she smiles and nods and stretches her hand. Increasingly, he takes it."

Grief : A Petition
Allison Joseph

I want to limit grief to fourteen lines,
to capture it inside a rhyming box
that I can put together, then unlock
when brave enough to claim the grief that's mine.
I want to make my sorrows small enough
that I can carry them one at a time,
assured I've made a space where they're confined, grief unrestrained too fertile, too vast and rough to go unchecked. I need to break it down, go bit by bit until I've built a space
with boundaries that wrap their way around,
like vines around a stake. I want grief bound,
hemmed in by words so I don't have to face
its clamoring, that unrestricted sound.