Visitors

I wished to be closer to my mother
to think of displacement in a different way.

To part the bright green new growth
of a plant she has asked me to gather.

We never imagined so many years apart.
I have no way to make...

This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...

we are not that kind of country.

We are sanctuary for the hungry,

the homeless, the huddled,

held together by an idea

our immigrant fathers believed in.

Rendered, it meant independence.

Pursued, it kindled war, ordinance,

a fighting chance. Forty thousand

musket balls, by themselves, did not

shape the...

We have lived on the horizon for so long,
coasts no longer know our flags.

They buried us where they bury ships,
Commonwealth projects, and literary whales,
which represent no threat.

Someday, a great writer will claim
we were an idea the breadth of an ocean
and,...

 
Agnes only had nine years to live. The angels must have begun to hover around her canvas like monkeys. This canvas has nine white thin strips between the red and blue ones. I’ve spent my life thinking about the blue...

It is winter in Anchorage, and I am only as tall as the shoveled snowbanks in the parking lot of the pink apartments. I am old enough to have chores but young enough not to fully understand frostbite. It is...

Home is a sound.
 I can hear it
in the western meadowlark, the inlaid rocks in my driveway,
 in the accent and slang
of my mom’s voice.
 It’s engrained
 in her stretched vowels,
in her smashed-together words, in her
 hard Rs,
and in the word rez.

I grew up hearing...