June 2023

I catalog what I cannot capture:
the sun, its ragged stumble into rockface,
the precise elevation of this plateau or the next,
the sea, of course, against which everything is measured.

My tools are insufficient, inexact.

For instance: there is no way to measure
the peak...

I haven’t been touched
in months. My mother appears in mirrors.
Her cheeks full like roses to plant
my lips against when she wakes. We huddle
under heavy razais, paisleys to our mouths. Delhi creeps
in fingers of smog through windows. My father
likes to leave...

It was the little Bible I had on my lap—the New
Testament. It was “white patent,” like my shoes.
It might be a clutch purse, I felt,
and I was being admirably still and quiet

with my white patent-leather clutch purse,
pretending I was a...