“Late summer is the sluttiest / season my digital violet / crocs are in sport-mode.”

“the solar system has taken billions of years to live like this”

“They’re thickest in summer, skulk in the alleys, yawn on front lawns, scavenge restaurant dumpsters like rats. They have long, fleshy tails and hairy, pointed ears. They’re embodied, and also not, like how the word stray is both a noun and a verb.”

“Today, my Google search history includes what is the half-life of the human body? I came up emptier than I began.”

“Sing at the top of my lungs, pretend I am whistle-tone Mariah / as I whine my hips, a triple threat with my smile”

“Today is Pyramids Day according to a Redditor on the Frank Ocean subreddit / because the 199th day at 3:31am is the calendar year’s equivalent of when the / beat switches in that song”

“The third snake was unearthly / black // so deep it was hard to see at all / silver and lighter gray scales // catching light like the planets we saw / at Joshua Tree”

“ I am an ovulsbian, as you call it— / because ovules are feminine wards protecting us”

“In this poem, which is an attempt at condensing superfluous (elitist?) (white?) logic into bite-sized words, further packaged within the sonnet form, further stretched left-to-right, the poet analyzes…”

“I’ve always thought of Luther Hughes as a keystone in our contemporary poetic moment. There are few as dedicated to the good work of celebrating others as Luther, and I’ve been both grateful and inspired by their commitment to accessible literary spaces.”

“The first rule of Women’s Self Defense class: / Is to highly recommend it to everybody you know.”

“BLUE: Nostalgia as neither past nor present tense but the second person.”

“As I grew up, I started to purposely do things that people found disgusting. I once goaded my friend into daring me to eat a piece of rubbery white dried gum on our school’s sidewalk. Another time, with little provocation…”

“let the sink faucet drip said miss llorona where are you sad lady we’re the rare occasion asking to be snatched and saturated”

“my first period at age 10; / I woke up on my dad’s couch; / blood on my thighs; / 5am in the feminine hygiene aisle, / foreign to us both”

“Anxiety doesn’t know what to do / with my face or where to put / my eyes.”

“A priest, a punk, and a poet stand at the foot of my bed, / each self a blue-eyed beast I cannot evict from my head.”

“The ocean has blond hair and brown eyes. He has a little sister like me.”

“Whooo, whooo. The whispers of a hundred pigeons take flight inside my body and I feel myself levitate into the air and open up my wings. But just as easily, I sink back down into the yawning mouth of the bed.”

“in the slim hallway of my kitchen / my father

cleans the crabs without the usual silver tools /”