I shut my eyes under the scalding stream
		scrubbing off last night’s dream
when suddenly I hear your voice again
	as though it caught in the clogged drain
	
and was sent bubbling back up from the other
		world where you’re not my mother.
This time it’s really you. I’m really here.
	I blink. We do not disappear.

Dad left, you say, to shower at the shop
		so I don’t need to stop
just yet—and yet I do, unable to
	resume old customs, unlike you.

In a one-bath four-person household, we
		learned what we mustn’t see,
become, in time, so coolly intimate
	with one another’s silhouette

behind the opaque frosted shower screen
		that once more stands between
us two. While at the mirror you apply
	foundation and concealer, I

wash out my hair with rosewater shampoo,
		which means I’ll smell like you	
all day. Mama, I shout, I’m coming out,	
	and as you look away I knot

around me tight your lavender robe de chambre,
		cinching my waist, and clamber
out of the tub, taking care not to step
	outside the cotton mat and drip

on the cracked floor you’ve polished with such zeal
		we’re mirrored in each tile.
Yet, you’d forgive the spillage, or forget.
	What else will you love me despite?




Originally appears in The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tinhouse, 2024)

they celebrate sobriety 
birthdays with a single, 
large fake cake.
A little grubby but still 
trusty, tasty-looking.

Only in LA, I mutter 
to the eye candy 
sitting next to me. 
My knee’s almost 
touching his muscled 
lower thigh (yes,
 
short shorts in winter).
At least a dozen
standing in line 
to make Oscar-length 
speeches. None pretend
to eat the cake.

Once it’s over, I walk
Santa Monica Boulevard,
that street of sin, 
expecting hordes of drinkers, 
but no—the sidewalks 
are plague-quiet, 
cars heading elsewhere. 

I enter Fatburger. 
Jerky teens 
huddle around tables,
plushies clinging
to their backpacks.
I send a photo 

of my Oreo milkshake
and chocolate chip cookie
to my husband 
back at the Universal
Sheraton, so he knows
what’s keeping me,
so he doesn’t
fear the worst.

i knew right then that this would change me
would make me tender again
my ribcage, a mountain side opening
wind pushing through earth

would make me tender again
you arrived a burning morning sky
wind pushing through earth
opened my heart with your fist

you arrived, a burning morning sky
we met in late summer
opened my heart with your fist
the season, coveting us in her heat

we met in late summer
my ribcage, a mountain side opening
the season coveting us in her heat
i knew right then that this would change me

A cocky man always has something to say,
sends a selfie with his shirt pulled up to his head.
Tell it to my abs, he texts. Ego on display.

A man like that leaves a sane person in dismay.
He believes his words relieve women of all dread
as he struts about with all his important things to say.

At a reception, a friend tells me about the day 
a male poet thought he’d get her in his bed. 
Tell it to my abs, baby, he texts. Hubris on display.

Tight body, bad attitude — solid F, not an A,
I confess while we wait in line for the cheese spread.
His abs are more interesting than his poetry, I say.

An eavesdropper asks, He really treats women that way?
A smug man’s words land with the weight of lead. 
Tell it to my abs, baby doll. Arrogance on display.

A pompous man’s drivel turns women away.
Incapable of reason, all his logic is long dead. 
A cocky man is never short of something to say. 
Tell it to my abs, he texts, a prick on full display.

When the only light 
left is flame, I burn 
to the end of me.
I think about Mulan,
somewhere between the flower 
and the blade. It’s too easy 
to say I am the moment
she sits and slashes 
her hair with her father’s 
sword. Each strand falling
like black rain against stone. 

It’s too easy to say I am 
the way she practices her man-
voice. Widens her walk like 
gravity is still deciding how much 
of her / not her to keep. 
It’s too easy to say that I am 
just the viewer.
Her / not her / him carrying 
through the scene like a question.  
This exit wound of identity blooming 
like an uncurling fist. 

That as a child, I didn’t notice her 
chest binding, didn’t feel that flutter 
in my belly when she pulled up her hair,
became Ping. I am sorry I am capable 
of being what others least expect. 
I mean there is something more

beneath my girl hands than boy hands. 
Like how beneath Li-Shang’s disappointment 
was desire, which walked the length 
of Mulan until their clothes begged us all 
to be good boys / not boys again.




Originally published in The Pinch

Today, adjusting my jacket
in strong wind, I look down
to the hem, remember the neat
way she’d pull up the bottom 
zipper—quick, decisive—to open 
a gap for her hips. Who are we,

those many years ago,
to our current selves? Twice
a decade, we meet for tea, polite 
about the others we’ve gone on 
to love. Her small hands. How 

they seemed capable of almost 
anything: thumb nudging a throttle
just enough to come alongside 
a dock;  what we did below
decks and in the gear locker,

the smell of burned nylon 
from the line cutter, a thin, 
heated blade that separated
strands and cauterized them
so they wouldn’t fray, all
around us, everything I wanted 
to be, awakening.





Originally appears in SOFAR: Poems (Persea, 2025)

You’ll never not want to kill yourself, he said,
matter-of-factly, he’d probably sat across from
hundreds or thousands of us—a new track
of an old song—So the best you can do, here
he held my hand, is find something to live for

every single day. He gave me back my shoelaces,
wallet, keys, a list of local shrinks I’d never afford
or visit anyway, and, as if it just came to him,
he said, I’ve never seen a guy get as many visitors
as you, honest to god—

The same observation of Hobo Ryan, who told me
to call him that, nineteen, checked himself in
for a few nights off of Ocean Avenue, handsome, 
straight but didn’t mind a guy’s mouth for a price,
laughed when he found out I was “the suicide”

Man, I’d do anything to be you, be gay even, haha—
I don’t mind admitting I loved him then—But really,
It’s been almost a month and you’ve had visitors
every goddamn day! Had it been that long? I lost
hours and days, half my mind, and yet

He was found out in the middle of the night, 
no mental or emotional illness, no insurance,
no way to say goodbye or tell me his last name
which even the doctor couldn’t give me, just
a lanky blonde kid saying, I know this is weird, 

the night before, But do you think I can sleep 
here with you—nothing gay, man, just, I don’t
know, do you mind? How could I? Not at all. Just
two guys who’d never see each other again
trying to find something to live for.




Originally appears in Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023)

Rest in the cradle of unspoken beds, no finger or hand of a stranger inside you, 
no hide of sacred cow for your sling, no salt of golden showers, no pig roast 

or chains of Marley, thrust shaken. Live this one day in containment, complete, 
body and mind released from the flesh you are not. Reclaim eyes from your father,

set your toe in the crack of the bathhouse floor, always a gap in that shrine. Transcend
the pierced tongue, pierced nipple, pierced frenulum. Break the club’s red exit 

light. Moisten lips, speak to spirit, close your mouth, tighten anus, brighten this 
dungeon with god glow. Gather funk, collect sweat, fashion angels 

stinking of sea. Transform into selkie, swim toward dawn. Float, without hunger 
or yearning for others. Release the infinite ocean of thirst you have swallowed.




Originally published by Under a Warm Green Linden

tasteful naked woman twisted overhead		hangs forcing me to look        	
 the word Shapely in the 	italic         one arm inert across breasts          no
										                                         pubes whatsoever	   
           hand flung on the back of her head proves she’s never heard
 of armpit hair                                    	
                                you’ve won TWO free slimming sessions at LONDON WEIGHT   
         MANAGEMENT!				                                the first time she touches me
         the shape of suggestion: you might be OLD           but you don’t need to be FAT         	
                        indignities half-off                       	postural suggestions: 

                        a leaping gazelle with            	        head tilt like frostbite

        			     the slimming manager 
holds me in front of the mirror. gently
 then so firmly I lose balance.  	she shows me
         	how bloated. curving wrong. being held here
 reminds me of being spread open       	forced to look
 so my hole cunt is apparent to me       	of neck holds
 voice in my ear making me slick             except slimming managers have never heard of
					                                lesbians,

BDSM, erotic degradation, asphyxiation for fun & pleasure          highly specific
 								                                                        about serving only      
                            FEMALE 
                            customers              	        it’s 
                            ok if I get wet
                            if they never smell it

wear nothing but paper bra and paperer bloomers. gel
 smears on my stomach slope an insistent sucking whine. vacuum hungering
 scifiesque for underskin         	 wobble

                              would be sensual without her repeatedly asking
                 which other of my parts dissatisfied me. my gizzard,

I tell her patiently. bordering
 on incredulous she asks, where else? I refrain from
 elaborating I am incandescence            	walking the earth
 unused to inventing imperfection        	receiver of worship as my due

slimming manager resorts to waving my wedding at me
says if I do not submit myself she	         cannot make me sexy sexy like that
		             lists other women’s insecurities:
 particularly when fat
                                             	          spills over
                     	the back clasp of their bra
                                 	(foreign experience to me, non-bra wearer)

offers obscene price reductions for
                                             	          using my data in a case study
I say, keep it,
 it’s on the house,
         	feeling like skinnyfat jesus in the circling 40-day heat

the prettiest of slimfit temptresses points out my
 grotesque shoulders rounded and ogrelike
 she asks but why do you think you don’t need this. 	

                            flummoxed I can only say idiotically

because
 there is                     	no need.

the tasteful Shapely woman she’s nothing but framing,
arresting, sentenced to real conviction,
displayed in the effulgent cavern of shamelessness

slimming manager keeps asking me why but she speaks only mandarin
 so it sounds like, what is your way of thinking?
what is your thought? what were you thinking?

and I,
must stop thinking
right now

              
               Toward dusk the light was
lapis, veined with cirrus, bird, and contrail, 
poplars alchemizing green to gold,
a light we might call glassy with the sun
behind it, low and cutting, like the final
word of an ongoing argument.

We’d fucked so hard the bed had bounced us off.
We’d laughed, in shame or shock, then climbed back in.
Night had not come on yet, as it would—
the bikes were paper cut-outs in the distance,
their riders one-dimensional, unhurried, 
		pulling the dark behind them.



Originally published by Plume, appears in The Unbecoming (Norton, 2026) 

is what Tristan called me 
at the 8th grade lunch table 

when the burning desire 
to see me in a box 

made him boyishly claim 
a name, a language, a body 

i hadn’t finished growing into. 
i never said i was a lesbian. 

cuz you’ll never wear lipstick 
he slipped in through howls 

of laughter. and i chuckle 
in acceptance. known 

to swallow whatever 
the boys are pouring. 

they’re who the girls go 
giddy over and i needed an in 

to the crowd. the girls. the box. 
the show he had no business watching 

that talked about girls kissing girls 
and made it somewhat okay. 

i needed to feel seen, even as a joke. 
better that than invisible. 

plus, everyone loved blistex. call this 
a lesson in naming and lubrication. 

Because I come from a long line of bisexual nonbinary pacifists 
married to cis gender hetero army officers, and because

the opening of this poem is a lie, but a sweet one: 
a silk flower of a sentiment. I just want to say it somewhere:

I am not alone. I inherited what is good from people who tried 
to do right but also did wrong, who enabled pain 

while cultivating love where it wasn’t expected to grow. 
My grandparents appreciated bowls of painted stone grapes 

and apples because it showed them what plenty might look like 
on their tables. Every day is an argument in favor of surprise. 

I show my daughter how to twist a plastic plumeria blossom 
the color of margarine into her dark hair 

because real plumeria blooms far away from where we are 
while the Dollar Tree near our house is bountiful with 10¢ knockoffs,

and I remember how little beauty has to do with exactness. 
It is more concerned with what we hope about the contradictory world:

that it remains both soft and callused, rare and everywhere, 
that it is what it has been and what it could be too.




Originally published in Hole in the Head Review

the oceans receded from this desert many thousands of years before 
we ever got here. But our thirst has persisted, dry as ammonites
in the acequia behind my grandparents’ house, and I figured it must be
a fake, but I still have that rock and it only makes less sense the older I am,
that I hold in my hand and dampen with my sweat this old dead thing,
and worry what new terrors will rise with the seas, drowning succulents 
and sidewinders, rising to meet the jagged edge of mesa it used to visit 
when high and low tide were much higher. When I was a child we were 

           landlocked. 

When the ocean redraws its borders and all the skeletons are exhumed 
from the banks of the river to rise back onto this land, will we mark 
our new maps with new monsters? Will my grandson write a poem 

                                            about my boat?





Originally published in Hooligan Mag

in the space between 
anything and ancestor 
 
let us attune to the frequency  
of what has not yet been lost 
 
two daughters wed beneath a birch tree 
twelve lilies, pink, wrapped in paper  
 
inside the sound of sunset is a red banner 
proclaiming NO MORE RENTS 
 
no more trains on their way to lengthen pipelines 
no defendants arrested against the tracks  
no bicycles painted white at the intersection 
 
may these days of ending allow us still  
to water the marigold seedlings, morning-bright 
 
let there be fig squares, broken in half 
let there be music and synchronized movement 
 
let there be the goodbyes we waited for  
our whole lives, let there be our whole lives 
 
our laughter, effervescing and errant 
 
I would choose it  
again, yes, every time

In the comforts of my company
I have the Annie John urge
to seek the scent of my cunt,
that exquisite way I purr into a room. 

Luxuriate as if seaside and horizon
always being the tease, but these waves,
with their predictable highs and lows, 
cease lapping. All this to say, 

I am a free woman now, and a spiritual 
medium saw Harriet Tubman by my side, 
which means there is no turning back.
Clarity is a singular truth that illuminates

corners that make you feel some shame.
I stop polishing the mirror and look 
without distraction or correction— ego
is a box stamped fragile. And I am fecund

on these linen sheets, deep in my inner world,
in my clay, in my love’s darkest part. 

Of course, you have sex in a puddle 
on this worn stone: your sperm travels 
to an egg flung from a wet velvet mass 
of more moss. But you’re also asexual by choice;
you make more of yourself by breaking 
off new shoots. Though I won’t get to choose, 
I hope you fuck your way across my name
in the graveyard, as I did once, parked 
in an oak’s shade by Chapel of the Chimes
as Billie Holiday sang, love is just like a faucet. 
Now, I barely think of that boy, but the view 
of Oakland past the graves was lichen-blue. 
Beyond our car, deer bounded in pairs 
over the headstones, as if death 
were no impediment, just a hurdle to vault.
I was seventeen and most of my life
felt like nothing, 
but I wrote with a pen pressed so hard 
it scored the coming page with white words
like names on graves, ground down
to unreadable limestone divots.
I know I will have a death certificate
without my beloved named on it. 
She and I will be “strangers in death,” bound
by our un-inked vows. Moss, will you 
be my last marriage? When I have no one 
as my spouse, can I have you,
making my name lush, wet, and swollen 
on my stone? I want you 
to retrace my chiseled name with a heavy fist,
bringing letters to life— stay pressed 
on me until you are crisp as pubic hair 
against the hand that tries to brush you away,
when you are thin as dried ink, even when
you are gray flakes across my name. 




Appears in Hover (Omnidawn Publishing, 2025)

There’s no meaning hidden behind the metaphors:
peel one line after another, and you will find
the sea is still the sea, the flood still the flood.

The border gates you thought were waiting,
you’ve crossed them when you were a child.
There’s no meaning hidden behind the metaphors.

Being paid under the table, having your paycheck 
withheld, beef once a month, the hands upon you—
the sea is still the sea, the flood still the flood.

And the water rose. And the water rises. You 
knew all this was waiting from the moment you left.
There’s no meaning hidden behind the metaphors:

You can change the pattern of your footsteps, the length 
of your hair, your rate of speech—there's no better life.
The sea is still the sea, the flood still the flood.

Your truth has been calling your name at home: 
     there’s no one to save you. 
There’s no meaning hidden behind the metaphors—
the sea is still the sea, the flood still the flood.

1.

Harvey Milk 
Sal Mineo 
Brandon Teena 
Matthew Shepard 
because America needed 
a scarecrow

2. 

Rock Hudson shamed and famous 
Gaëtan Dugas blamed for everyone
when they named him patient zero 

3.

boys whose mothers chose the least-gay picture
boys whose fathers found the magazines
boys who turned tricks because the rent was due

4. 

Freddie Mercury’s falsetto
Jackie Hormona’s blond hair
Michael Bennett’s dance moves

anonymous choir boys 
half lit near side curtains
wearing tap shoes

5. 

boys dead before Condoms Save Lives
dead before PrEP
dead after PrEP 
before marriage
before banks sponsored Pride 

6.

Dahmer boys Gacy boys 
instead of them 
we remember their monsters 


7.

boys nobody would swim with
boys who never made it to forty
night-sweat boys AZT boys
boys in bedrooms powdering lesions

8. 

hustlers murdered in motel rooms
hustlers stuffed into trash bags
hustlers who fucked the men
others were afraid to						

9.

earring boys choir boys			
football boys who liked lipstick 		

beautiful boys ugly boys
boys who pointed guns 
at bedroom mirrors

dead boys in porn loops
on blue-light screens

bathhouse boys 
truck-stop boys 
footnote boys 
who will never 
be in print

10.

boys on missing posters
whose families didn’t give a shit

When seafoam met Titan’s blood 
a spark self-actualized. Took form & blossomed 
a transition, a birth, a bloom 

Many can’t love themselves
into existence 

Aphrodite did

And I bet when she rose from the ocean 
The sun blushed 

And I bet when she stepped foot on 
land the trees became shy 

And I bet all of nature came 

rushing to catch a gander, everything gawking 
at the goddess who was her own mother 

A deity that never needed a handout 

She created herself in her own image. Blueprint 
for many a self-imagined woman to follow

And I bet when she sprung from the ether
the moon cried. 

And I bet when she looked up 
the stars cried 

I know she was glowing, I know she was shining, 
I know all other gods were jealous and she, beautiful as she was,

couldn’t have cared less





Appears in Abomination Pink (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2026)