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.

Our sons told us to place the steel cleavers we used to butcher hogs and chickens beneath our pillows, in case our enemies appeared.

Papa blew way over the limit on the field test, but he swore it was a set-up. He kept a loaded assault rifle next to the front door, and a handgun under the seat of his truck.

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…

Your husband watches like a phantom through the window, his face silvered in smoke. His eyes, once brimming with affection, have slanted into whispers. You want his puckered face to catch a clod of dirt.

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...

Janet was ten when our town turned to poultry. Layers and broilers at first, but there was no profit in eggs and soon it was all just pluck and slaughter. She stood alongside line workers, barefoot in buckets of warm water to keep frostbite away.

Tahlequah, OK, has one Wal-Mart, one good regional supermarket, many of the major fast food chains, two operational video stores, and 16,000 residents.…

            Recently, I was talking to my friend, Camas, at a party when the subject of our college admittance essays came up. I haven’t done a lot of…

A flood takes no notice of the borders we construct between inside and out. Like Cassandra sitting in the kitchen sink at her window, the Willoweed family and servant Old Ives can do nothing but observe.

Ilana, the Hebrew teacher at Houston's Beth Yeshurun Day School, which we called Beth Yesh, gave us actual-size apple-shaped milk chocolates that fell apart into neatly overlapping slices. One day an angry girl whose mother had given me a Pinocchio puzzle for my third birthday shouted...

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?

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…

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...

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

There’s one hundred and three year-old Mazal, known for the decades she gave to cleaning bodies before burial. Preparing the dead for death. Did they ever come to you, I ask. No, she guffaws, proof, as she sees it, of a job well done.

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...

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 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...

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

"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…

In response to anti-Black racist violence, help us support Black lives through literature and art, as well as efforts for justice in Houston, by donating…