Who called Mirrellez C. Elliott and told her that her son had died in police custody? How many minutes did it take for the police to drive De’Sohn from where he was arrested in New Haven to the police station at One Union Avenue?

For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me, like you sort of hope there is when you're a teenager.

Mom says a white deer means blood is coming. When I sleep, the forest floor is a lake of red, no matter if the deer are white or brown. A gunshot sounds.

By the base of his steps, there was a flower pot with a sad, half-dead plant. She lifted the thing. Felt the small force of its weight against her. Stupid, she knew. But she was a container brimming over. And she needed to let something go.

But in another language, in my father’s mouth, there is a tenderness to the tone he takes, so that the word beat overlaps with other words, some of them meaning I miss you. He says beat as if the word shares a border with laughter. As if it is just a lost synonym for love.

To be diagnosed with a rare disease is to have wildness pressed upon you. You are not exactly the secretive quarry that birders travel the world to add…

A polar bear travels two hundred miles and arrives in Iceland. It climbs onto the shore with a great lumbering. It is an accident of travel. It is an animal…

I asked Grandpa how he got the silver medal he’s so proud of, and he said he got it for shooting a Northern Viet bastard right in the face. He said the…

and the tour guide said what a shame how awful the heroin in Kensington but we would not be focusing on that today because this was an African American Iconic Hero tour and she smiled beatifically at the Black couple and the Black couple only...

It’s approaching midnight and this is not how I would have wanted it to happen: sitting by myself on my porch, drinking wine from the bag of a box and chain-smoking cigarettes...

how easy it is to erase rusting yellows? / how easy to let blues blue into zombi? / how easy / is ease?

Do we all migrare: pass into a new condition? / Are we all natives—nativus: born in bondage— / walking toward no-border?

time when the turning birds silver time exploding brined like sweet lemons time wolves bark skunks slip into coops fishing line knots up roads slick proud with ice the boys I fuck all eat candy

It was a relatively inexpensive truck, and suburban parents could both afford it (or payments on it) and teens, if they were paying for the gas from their allowance, could afford the gas...

I inhabit the forest of my belly like an endangered and spotted owl. I hop into a stream, never the same one. I build a fire from the aphorisms from the cherry tree that grows from the loam of it...

In among the tossed out clothes / and furniture the Sacred Harp--the workmen raised it up / a jet passed overhead white / and perfect as a tooth…

Trespassing on ground of former love. Tussocks / whisper here of nests and the vanquished. Swans hiss and fish / nearby, undoing the slipknots of their throats...

Budapest Pale, blonde phantom / In sleeping gown, I am Barefoot at the precipice, / A cloud of invisible Long-haired, white rabbits / Leashed, to me. I am drowning...

They continue to throw salmon shadows darkening the spectrum as it prisms into conditions, leaving a ruin of bleached coral in regret...

We moved on low power since the noise neutralizers haven’t thawed from everything. We found rudimentary structures seemingly abandoned...

I think when I die I want my tombstone to say, / This guy noticed things and took enormous pleasure / in the noticing.

Due to gulfcoastmag.org's responsive design, this poem is best viewed in desktop mode to preserve the line breaks as they were orignially intended by the…

"I am pouring my language into new containers again and again, and I make sure each container has a different line length. As I pour my language into these…

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