Yet another test

              urine light & hydrated

fast from a lemon



former lemon seed

              before my son’s head

emerged downy



with dark hair.

              I wanted two

pink lines, despite



retroverted

              uterus, cervix shy—

conception age



geriatric, I am

              ever racked

with want 


though my small

              toddler sings

of lobsters, tells



me pincers pinch

              you can’t touch, Mama

He peppers the alphabet



with nouns

              L-M-N-O-cucumber!

What if I want



maximal joy? How dare I  

               be a woman in desire— 

begging for more

The south facing hills steam in morning sun, 
hoar frost gone, air redolent of spring. 

It’s February 6th. My father’s been dead forty-
one years. Still, he follows me, late to his side. 

Who was I then, not yet thirty. I didn’t trust
my own sense that he was gone. Forehead 

cold to my kiss. The mountains have lost their shrouds, 
covered instead in dust of snow. I’m going down. 

My shadow leans into these northern hills. 
When I turn to look, it looks back. 

trying to get to heaven? 
stick your tongue up god’s ass 

know you full of shit?  
 fuck off and kiss god’s ass  

if we made in his image then he made in ours  
 hallelujah praise god for that fat ass 

has he been good to you? did he wake you up this morning?  
 get on your feet lift your hands go on rub god's ass 

sometimes you have to run down your blessing 
 knees to your chest now speed up and catch god's ass 

true its not always easy and lord knows he don’t listen 
 and it gets hard not to beat god's ass 

i ain't never met an ass that don’t stink 
 and that includes god's ass 

you wanna be the little spoon or you wanna walk in his favor?  
 be smart curl your body and make a seat for god’s ass  

Breezy don’t deny him stop fronting and tell the world  
 how much you love god's ass 

          
     “Saben Más Que Las Arañas” 
                —a Puerto Rican expression

What do spiders know 
that we don’t 
 
after twenty years. 
 
The hair on the back 
of your neck bristles 
 
beneath my fingertips. 
 
No one cares. 
Last spring you knelt 
 
in the grass to plant
flowers along the curb.
 
Tonight, it’s littered
 
with trash. I want you 
to kiss me like that.

      after D.A. Powell

Jotting down my last thought
before this world ends,
by which I mean
before you come in here completely
naked.

My angel, fallen,
keep searching for those lost wings
inside me.
I hope
you never find them.

Each time you come
the world ends,
by which I mean
begins.
A sudden bursting.




Originally published in & Change; Appears in the collection, In the Middle of a Better World (Central Avenue Poetry, 2026)

Another life in the Bay & still I fall for that sunshine 
ice wind. Wind that floods my silk skirt 

as I whisper eucalyptus, my imagined safeword. 
I’m a tan fourth-generation Californian 

wearing socks in July. I want Chinese grandmothers
to pick the peaches sweet enough 

to eat. When the cashier 
calls me miss, I’m flattered, but also

I have earned my ma’am respect. Old enough
& I sing of BTS — praise the one wearing a shirt

splashed with Dorothy asleep 
in a Technicolor field, the poppies 

overbright like lanterns. Over a hundred 
years ago, my great-grandfathers refused to die 

as bachelors. They found wives 
in Chinatown mission rescue homes 

or brought them back from China, 
sailing on the ocean’s indifference 

before interrogation at Angel Island. 
As a living miracle: I float, curving 

through a church on rollerskates, 
disco-lit. I flirt & flee in ecstatic florals

across this earthquake land. Maybe I’m 
the foolish future, ignoring swipe right 

notifications across the gender spectrum
in another faded summer of free love,

wandering through the fog of lost parachuters, 
fog of abandon, fog of broken spells—



Originally published in Wildsam San Francisco travel guide

It's tickling to have an athletic new lover,
Virile citizen who artfully maintains

The metropolis’s countless fountains,
A vocation intrinsically 

Fairy-tale appealing & phallic.
Meticulous Melchior admits 

He overheard me singing 
Acapella near the esplanade

& shadowed me in the Parque Forestal
To further his English...

Summer-venerating Mel, 
My January sun cicerone, shares 

Chile's scrumptious native dish, 
His unfailing pastel de choclo

& ushers me through
Exhilarating queer barrios

Blessed with lyrical names: 
Lastarria, Bella Vista—

Before La Moneda, the presidential palace,
My shrewd custodian relates 

His slender, southernmost country’s 
Unrelenting political seesaw:

Translation: “Right & Left 
Tantamount to a pair of headlong,

Ready-to-roll arm-wrestlers”—    
I gasp, when, with little warning,

We suddenly reach Londres #38, 
Notorious location

Of veering detention and torture—
In the land of the reliably festive 

& the perennially violent,
We brand-new novios watch 

Pablo Larrain's El Conde,
Spectacular black & white satire 

(Oscar-nommed for cinematography—
Let’s hear it, ladies & gentlemen, 

For unabashed hometown pride!)
With a sad-sack vampire version 

Of censorius President-for-Life Pinochet
Soaring & scanning a bric-a-brac 

Facsimile of Santiago’s 
Multiple lambent streets 

& inkwell-dark alleyways
For his ensuing blood-scrumptious meals—

O earthquake-jostled world
Of contradiction!

O Chile of newfound romance
& haunting carnage!

      Santiago, January 2025

lately since becoming a dickless
man I feel power
over women ignoring
they see me in my Jerry Orbach
in Dirty Dancing golf shirt
as their fathers in other words
they'll fuck me and be angry
what great confessional
poetry I'm seeding
in this neck massage

a weedy warmth
I smell the roots of her hair
is this sex
to be open to disgust
he picks up my foot
like it's his own
taint he's pressuring with his thumb
I regret my argyle socks

is this sex when a baby
becomes a porcupine
so his mother's waves of hungry love
don't crawl all the way inside
my first memory
is holding my breath
Patrick Swayze is dead

but this man sweats like him
stretching his ropy dancer's arms
across my chest my nice
flat itchy scars
I could do something

to this woman's stomach I want to touch
like a water bed
to that man who intimidates me like a horse
is this sex when I lie
crushing his hard hipbones
he rolls his proud eyes
I sink into my own gut like Baby
when the mean girls in daffodil-cup dresses
whisper about her back-kitchen tango

I apologize for leaning on his windpipe
I am not losing my hair in a fashionable way

at home my husband has a broken leg
is this sex when I hold the bowl
for his mouthwash spit
and kiss his unplastered toe while we watch Errol Flynn
leap gallantly from the galleon's rigging
my husband does not want to cuddle Errol Flynn
I used to want him to fuck me but now I just want his boots

is this sex when as a galley slave
he's whipped filthy and shirtless
I felt at age ten I shouldn't have seen that
hot and disturbed if I wasn't
pure something would kill me
that was when I became a pervert
I invited my husband to the cuddle party
in his wheelchair but he squeaked
like The Sea Hawk's Spanish maiden
when the rose thorn pierces her thumb

his movie is over
the queen has declared victory
and I wash his balls with a sponge




Appears in Introvert Pervert (The Word Works, 2026)

No way to be sure the man isn’t lying
afterwards, when he stands and tells you
that he has cancer, then adds
stage four and touches his chest. Nearly 40,
bearded, careworn, but also boyish, a little
vulnerable in his heavily lidded eyes.
Everything he says is a mumble followed
by nervous laughter. No treatment
this time—even after that, the laugh—
I’m just going to try to have some fun first.
If you had a record of his voice, old vinyl,
you could slow it on the turntable, use
your fingers to drag and deepen it, give
his words an appropriately sodden weight.
Maybe draw out that final word, first,
for a full minute, letting it fill an otherwise
silent room. He doesn’t pause after,
throwing on his shorts, T-shirt, wind
breaker. In fact, he’s halfway down
the stairs while you’re still sitting up in bed
thinking about the ribcage you’d just held—
thin man, smallish, so you’d been able to
cradle him wholly, how you’d enjoyed
that fragility—and all the cancer inside it,
how, in a way, you’d held that, too.




Originally appeared in Copper Nickel 

While admiring the bounty of tomatoes in Q and M’s garden, 
we’re visited by crows. There are two, which makes it a murder. 
Q says that’s sick, sick itself a word inverted like a dog 
belly-up in the grass. A pack of hounds, a mob of kangaroos, 
a tower of giraffes. Here we’re a constellation of queers, 
sticky-fingered at the weekly potluck. Overhead, an astonishment 
of sunlight. The oven sweetens with lemon tarts. 
Y kneads my shoulder’s obstinate knot, knot also being 
a measure of nautical speed. When we touch, we’re a wrist 
of water bisecting. The table sings us a kindness of rice, quivers 
of spiced zucchinis, a pickle of carrots, a blush of fresh berries. 
J brought flowers again, bosoms of dogwood and hyacinth 
for us all. What a wonder, what a word, almost wander, 
as in through a luminous forest of dreams, almost window, 
a sly peephole into forever, where we fatten astride our loves 
like happy ears of corn. Dinner’s ready, M calls. 
Off we go, a tenderness of beloveds, 
our skirts of sorrow unfolding like flight, to feast 
on a conspiracy of all our hopes.



Previously appeared in Adi Magazine

I knew it then, in that room where we found 
for the first time our eyes, and everything— 
even the din and smoke of the city around us— 
disappeared, leaving us alone as if we stood 
the last two in the world left capable of love, 
or as if two mirrors face-to-face with no end 
to the light our eyes could bend into infinity. 

I knew since I knew you—but we couldn’t… 

I caught the sunlight pining through the shears, 
traveling millions of dark miles simply to graze 
your skin as I did that first dawn I studied you 
sleeping beside me: Yes, I counted your eyelashes, 
read your dreams like butterflies flitting underneath 
your eyelids, ready to flutter into the room. Yes, 
I praised you like a majestic creature my god forgot 
to create, till that morning of you suddenly tamed 
in my arms, first for me to see, name you mine. 
Yes to the rise and fall of your body breathing, 
your every exhale a breath I took in as my own 
wanting to keep even the air between us as one. 

Yes to all of you. Yes I knew, but still we couldn’t… 

I taught you how to dance Salsa by looking 
into my Caribbean eyes, you learned to speak 
in my tongue, while teaching me how to catch 
a snowflake in my palms and love the grey 
clouds of your grey hometown. Our years began 
collecting in glossy photos time-lining our lives 
across shelves and walls glancing back at us: 
Us embracing in some sunset, more captivated 
by each other than the sky brushed plum and rose. 
Us claiming some mountain that didn’t matter 
as much our climbing it, together. Us leaning 
against columns of ruins as ancient as our love 
was new, or leaning into our dreams at a table 
flickering candlelight in our full-mooned eyes.

I knew me as much as us, and yet we couldn’t… 

Though I forgave your blue eyes turning green 
each time you lied, but kept believing you, though 
we learned to say good morning after long nights 
of silence in the same bed, though every door slam 
taught me to hold on by letting us go, and saying 
you’re right became as true as saying I’m right, 
till there was nothing a long walk couldn’t resolve: 
holding hands and hope under the street lights 
lustering like a string of pearls guiding us home, 
or a stroll along the beach with our dog, the sea 
washed out by our smiles, our laughter roaring 
louder than the waves, though we understood 
our love was the same as our parents, though 
we dared to tell them so, and they understood. 

Though we knew, we couldn’t—no one could. 

When the fiery kick lines and fires were set for us 
by our founding mother-fathers at Stonewall, 
we first spoke defiance. When we paraded glitter, 
leather, and rainbows made human, our word 
became pride down every city street, saying: 
Just let us be. But that wasn’t enough. Parades 
became rallies—bold words on signs and mouths 
until a man claimed freedom as another word 
for marriage and he said: Let us in, we said: love 
is love, proclaimed it into all eyes that would 
listen at every door that would open, until noes 
and maybes turned into yeses, town by town, 
city by city, state by state, understanding us 
and the woman who dared say enough until 
the gavel struck into law what we always knew:

Love is the right to say: I do and I do and I do… 

and I do want us to see every tulip we’ve planted 
come up spring after spring, a hundred more years 
of dinners cooked over a shared glass of wine, and 
a thousand more movies in bed. I do until our eyes 
become voices speaking without speaking, until 
like a cloud meshed into a cloud, there’s no more 
you, me—our names useless. I do want you to be 
the last face I see—your breath my last breath, 

I do, I do and will and will for those who still can’t 

vow it yet, but know love’s exact reason as much 
as they know how a sail keeps the wind without 
breaking, or how roots dig a way into the earth, 
or how the stars open their eyes to the night, or 
how a vine becomes one with the wall it loves, or 
how, when I hold you, you are rain in my hands.

I lived
An invisible life.
Like wisteria

In winter,
I grew, broke
Through depths

Nobody fathomed.
I devoured wind,
Wicked light

God invented.
I invented drama.
Just because

Was reason
Enough. To hope
Against hope

I became
Terrible, terrifying, terrific—
By spring

There was
No stopping me.
I suffered

No fools,
Except my nature.
To display

My genius,
I carried on.
I transitioned

Every season.
I was seasoned.
How? Because

I’m now
Mystery and clarity:
The candle

Flame casting
On the wall
No shadow

Yet making
Everything around it
A shadow.




Originally published in The New Yorker; Appears in All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin, 2022)

My boyfriend leaves a chair between us: the fag seat, 
he says, laughing at my scowl. We call a truce 
as the movie starts—someone else's war: Leonidas's 
squadron of musclebears versus the Persians, 
commanded by kohl-eyed Xerxes, an oiled display 
in a macrame jockstrap. Girl, even the celluloid 
is rolling its eyes up and down that body. 
Xerxes looks at Leonidas like a bottom scorned, 
but Leo marches his bronzed horde forward 
to reclaim a beachhead which will host future 
tea-dances, summer bear-bellied beer busts. 
Down our row, the battalion of fratboys growl, 
roused by the loinclothed choreography,
bloody chests grinding like they're in a movie 
called Spermopylae instead. You know the way Christ 
queer-baits you to eyefuck his rock-hard abs? 
I want to ask them, the movie over, out 
in the parking lot, but one chucks his soda 
at our chariot, naming us the stereo-ancient slurs. 
Closet cases, I say, pent up after hours of fuckless gay porn. 
Brandon blames me: You could detail the homoerotic 
contents of a mayonnaise jar, demands I pay 
for his car wash. Our battle is back on. One of us 
is a coward, one a dictator. One is happy to live
in filth, never washing a dish; one is intent on
making the other his personal slave. One leaves 
while one sleeps. Another Sparta was always 
waiting. Every movie turns true eventually. 
The men who come to cart the Coliseum 
of cardboard boxes away wear coveralls.
Each box they handle is labeled, my ex's name 
built with thick permanent marker, my script 
embellished by the flounciest pink hearts 
my hand can marshal. It's been years since 
I cried at the end of any movie.

Poetry is sneaking off with a great lover
	Into the bushes of a ritzy Los Angeles
Home, transporting you to climax — sex
	Serves as the coming-of-age rebellion
In this interlude of orchestral movements.
	Consider: the best part of the act could
Be getting caught, spurring jealousy from
	The onlooker. Voyeur taking a voyage
Into the unknown territory of cuck chairs
	And oh, how our main character used to
Hold onto hotel keycards for sentimental
	Reasons. Shots of afternoon rendezvous
Against the West Coast sun, tongues licked,
	How a college education teaches passion

	 When the Italian couple approaches her,
Their politeness on the sheets when Husband
	Watches Wife eat out our lead. Poetry dives
Into the getaway car — the last time you’ll see
	The greatest love of your life against casino
Lights, how rivers and mountains and oceans
	Away limit us to the ninety-minute runtime.  
In the bushes of the LA home, our lead thinks
	About Andrew McCarthy, in his prime damn,
Giggling with Jami Gertz as the young lovers
	Rekindle their romance, delivering interlude
From the main story of the film. Is romance 
	The distraction or the end game? There’s no
Better generational question. Now flashback

To our lead as a little girl throwing baby dolls
	On the floors of toy stores, her father hoping
She’d pick one up. Fathers wish the wrong 
	Things for their daughters, and other lessons.
Poetry becomes the home. Our lead grows up
	Taking on domestically challenged as viable
Personality trait. Armor? She ponders how 
	Main characters do not settle down if they
Want to remain compelling, how Hollywood
	Neatly bows up the domestication, the settling
With unworthy love interest turned life partner.
	 Amour? In the bushes of the ritzy Los Angeles
Home, our lead feels interlude as the characters
	Inside eat their poached pears, sip on their wine.  

It was freezing in the unheated churches.

My hair was uncombed,

My eyes couldn’t close.

Eyes of the ruling class dead

Stared down.

Underneath an expensive coat,

I had hairy legs and a classical phallus.

I wanted to be blindfolded.

The hallways of a villa

Filled with ghosts of illegitimate children—

Those were the voices

I heard in your apartment,

Scratching the headboard.

Rain in the ashtray, rain in the broken chair.

In the books stacked around us,

People bled over lust

For women. In public toilets,

Piss tethered strangers

To the wall, their hair flattened

By rain. When it rained,

The squares flooded like the urinals.

You like it here, or you don’t.

It’s climate change and unbridled tourism.

Also the punishment
	
Of the grim gods of water.

Their faces line the facades, each one

With a different feeling:

I am hungry, I am powerful,

I am lustful, I am defeated.

I lay awake feigning sleep, everything bronze.

The water opaque like coffee

Swallows the buildings,

I play dead in your arms.




Appears in The Bronze Arms (Penguin, 2026)

I’ve spent my days counting raindrops. I’m at eleven 
thousand & sixty-four. I cannot rely on words 
but I rely on words. Like when I say baby or mamacita. 
Like when I say I love every version of you. 
I lick the right breast, that cartography of want. 
The next wall over, neighbors whisper. No one 
trusts anyone. Nearby, men have built a colossal center. 
It’s not for shopping. Tomorrow will be the end 
of this black-blue night. Tomorrow will be the end 
of us too. I am a colorful bouquet of necessary  
flowers. I am a child in a field blowing 
dandelion seed. The French call it lion’s tooth. 
Surely, there’s an open hand to catch it all—

He said my name is really a kiln, a haul of groundwater 
because mouths open into hot vapor. He said my name
is actually a riverbed. He said to make of my name a choking
of cracked ice. He said to say my name is old water in a ditch.
 
He said to make of my name a peach tree on fire, a palm
of pollen. He said my name is really an aquifer, an aster field, 
an orchestra of damp tarps in a sheep corral, a downed pole
in Rocksprings. He said my name is as tall as a smokestack. 
 
He said my name tends to cause a draft, to be a touch of tequila. 
He said my name is reed, heavy blue mornings 
in June. He said to make of my name wildfire smoke. 
He said my name is rumor, the low beams of a pickup.
 
He said my name is really a sermon of locusts, boulder rust
in a river gorge. He said to make of my name a desert garden.
He said my name is the one pink evening when you whisper 
your name to the moon and it whispers back in monsoon.




Appears in Horses (Milkweed, 2026), originally published in Orion Magazine

if you fear you are not gay enough
go out and do something about it
like suck a dyke’s dick
or get fisted
dump your boyfriend
fear can be destructive and it will age you
it will age you like the sun
but you can enjoy your fear if you are careless with it
you can enjoy the sun
and let it graze upon your baby skin

if you fear not being queer enough
try to think of yourself as lyrical dirt
anticapitalist animals might furrow
sunlight might lavish sex upon
notice yourself mobile
[a bouncing part of the natural world]
if you fear not being read as queer
cut your hair weird
quit a job
practice your art
or I don’t know join a cell
locate a clit

I am trying to show you how good this can be
how much joy like how much liquid in these clouds
men can be wonderful but too many will ruin your life
they will ruin the garden of your love
because they will stand around you like a fence and crowd out
the queer birds, the queer beasts
and the queer creatures of the forest's fucking

I threw shade
inside a bar,
how I survived that decade,
like a dilettante.

Inside a bar,
puffing a blunt
like a dilettante,
I thought of myself

bluffing a punt.
The narrative, cyclical.
I thought of myself,
I tried to avoid.

The narrative cynical,
waiting on luck.
I tried to avoid
the cruel testing window,

waiting on luck
I’m sure I didn’t deserve.
The cruel testing window
I still cannot grieve…

I’m not sure what I deserve.
I throw shade,
I still cannot grieve
how I survived. That decade.



Originally published in Revel Issue 4

   What Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science might have contained when     
   ransacked by Storm Troopers and the Hitler Youth on May 6, 1933.


The maid’s uniforms worn 
	             by Dorchen 
	and four other trans women
		            who made this place a home.

	                             Twenty thousand volumes too dangerous
  	                                                        to touch without intention.


		             The last dance card from a drag ball 
			                          held in 1894, 
				                                       jammed as a bookmark 
			                                     into the Psychopathia Sexualis—

	                                                                               a shock of recognition 
	                                                                                          scrawled in the margin.             

	             The notes to seven satirical dance routines 
		                             choreographed to the tune of the Horst Wessel Song.


	                                              A kabbalistic numerology 
	                      	                                                            for divining the names 
		                                                   of forty-three million genders.


		                A transvestite license bearing the name 
		      of an ancestor 
		                                               with whom I share no blood.



Originally appeared Transgenesis (Milkweed Editions, 2024)