When I can’t sleep, it helps me to know
that two hours away, in a museum,
is Maybelle Carter’s guitar.

She was the woman thrown into the volcano
who survives.

This morning, a spotted orange butterfly touches down on my shoulder

We look at what could be your dog drowning.

A man was crawling on Hang Khay street today.

I’m a ripe watermelon take two

Like leaves pressed into
pages by a forgetful child
these meetings —
they mark nothing

The Ollie Impossible. The Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium.

inside the word there is here
where everything that is red is on fire, even the dirt

after so many bodies on my body

The woman hailing a taxi in the rain
who is almost crushed by another taxi

When I tie one nearly invisible fishing line
to another nearly invisible fishing line

The Santa Anas tug at my auntie’s hair,
thirsting as land thirsts.

It’s practically Spanish moss,
all of the fishing line dangling
from this tree.

i boil romano beans

We were all born half-dead in 1932, said Roque Dalton, half-alive.

“When you die, you will meet God,”  
reads the billboard  
foregrounding the stretch of industrial factories  
off the state highway  
on my commute home each night.

Philosophers bore me? Even Cardinals hate me?

A shorn grass edge talks down but you can’t talk down
a blazing pasture. Now, gasoline crackles rainbows over wheat stubble.