“Is it the mousse / melting slowly on my tongue, the waiter’s betraying / glance?”

“Flower yourself / Until you can’t recognize what exists underneath. Until you / Are diminished.”

“the close press of bodied glitter / molting from words into movement. / language has never been a second skin.”

“Give me seven, at least. With 10, / I’m sated, turned Satan.”

“Many of us feel more comfortable in “the back of the house” because that is where flavor originates. Where the cooking happens.”

“I love that poetry is a form that honors history, and I’m always going to be doing that, and I always want to be doing that in my writing—and I think that’s an act of love, acknowledging what has happened before you”

“Holding all this joy alone felt like a crime that would see me judged harshly by the universe. It was a kind of joy I wanted to share.”

“Little Worm, who left without a glance back and made Mother Worm question if she was ever needed at all.”

“So, for people putting together a first book, it’s really just the self you want to see in a physical form. And it’s okay if you don’t like that self, too. Because who does?”

“we were well behaved and beautiful by the tall windows : copies of Darwin and Sartre in our laps”

“What if the fridge is the hearth inverted, the homestead represented, not by flickering warmth, but by frigid eternity?”

“Figure out what is missing and learn to live without it.”

“You scrub, taking care to get between his toes, each one a prayer he’ll make it another year, a rosary of skin and bone.”

“But all I can think about / is how I want you to hold me so tight / my breath grows branches.”

“nobody expects me, the little 5’3 chinese girl—to bear chewbaccas bursting out of my chest, have medieval torches for ribs, lava overflowing from my canines • i’m irate for no fill-in-the-bubble reason”

“I was industrious /Obedient/I said ‘the bush’/The way you did”

The digital collage, “Medicine,” is a meditation on delight. The bodies are the only light source in the piece, thus signifying the collective power in Black pleasure, of which you cannot erase.

“whatever they want we can be whatever Ivory fantasy they want us to be our mouths full of them we can feel them stuck to the back of our throats as salt sweet syrup”

“But the poem itself is smarter than you. It needs to be better than the poet, and the only way to do that is to de-center yourself.”

“to name the demon is to take a cudgel to this scoured library, where the girl crams (to rote memory) the raids she withstood.”

“my mother coaxing my tears into a small offering, the soil shimmers. a mausoleum of new. / i don’t know death, only grief.”

“Sacred foods taste better, / but they always come with rules.”

“She likes to show everyone else how much of a good girl I am. How well behaved and responsible.”

“I still use money for therapyー all those pesky mommy issues alive and well. The only nightmares I have come from my obsession with horror movies.”

“Nights I stayed inside and ate alone in the dark. / Is there really any difference between planting a thing and burying it?”

“Be flattered her desire overrides her pain.”

“It’s salt and pleasure, at the end of it, before/ the daylight, that I want.”

“In this country, to be palatable / is to swim and drown at the same time.”