Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense.

I once prayed in the woods
inside a temple of

branches, and I felt the wind
rise and cease with

the waltz of my lungs,
and I knew She was alive;

My queering consonance. Rendered
by your fingers.

You type me in slowly.
Each digit. A psalm.

“Two girls among the green, between trees. Hands on hips, heads tipped back, eyes searching sky. Six years before Taylor Swift announced her eighth studio album by posting a photo of herself standing in a forest, she posted another photo of a forest holding two women, which she has since deleted from her grid. Don’t stress, it’s not gone. It’s just entered the next stage in the celebrity Instagram life cycle, which means that it’s truly ours now, property of the stans with the prescience to preserve.”

The deer is dead, road-crumpled, and surrounded by vultures—

an elegant coven of seven, necks bowed, dark wings shifting

like the skirts of gossiping widows. The vultures ignore

This day should be a carnival
for a man who oozed mischief.
I might have worn my long red skirt
waited for him to throw off the lid
look death in the eye and
mouth his usual refrain:
let’s get this show on the road.