Just outside of Chinatown, the stylist holds my hair in his hands and calls to his assistant. “Help me!”

She runs over and sticks her fingers into the dye-free floppy strands.

“It’s hard to hold!” he exclaims. “It’s so healthy!” she nods.

“It is sooo healthy!” he returns.

“We never see hair this healthy,” the assistant speaks into the now-falling tresses I see reflected in the mirror.

I adjust the gold-wire glasses I had to wear today because my puffy eyes would not accept contacts. And all I can think, in this moment, is that at least some part me is healthy as I feel my precancerous cervix cramp.

Reopening In a blue light, the woman is still. She is water recuperating after the kind of storm that again and again unfolds its violence and gives way to the drop of a stone. One morning, she is on the precipice of the small town where she sewed the hem of a too-long skirt: dusted…

Self-Portrait as Twice-Exorcised Child Should’ve known the demon wouldn’t leave so easy. Perched on the dresser it wears shadow, won’t let me see it directly, just claws and fangs, pale tongue like a serpent reaching for the floor. It tries to confuse me. “They said of Agatho that for three years he kept a stone…

You are here because you are supposed to be. Every year.Black hand to brown thigh. Wide jellied curling wand set and ready against you. Noting your age, 23, she says, So, you’ve never had sex before?Push.Hiss-Hurt-Holler.Good, Click-Crack-Crank. Wait until you’re married. Stretch. Stab. Sting. Just breathe, it’ll be over soon, the nurse coos, but if you breathe, you…

What you really need right now is that hong shao rou recipe.Not the one in the Times your bougie budsMartha Stewarted the shit out ofblowing half their take homes at the Ferry Building. No, the one you need is the one your Ma sharedthat time you fought in New May Wahthat time she showed youthe difference between dark and…

The following piece is the poetry winner of F(r)iction’s Fall 2021 literary contest

splinters her weathered skin,
plums rotting under the sun. Colors

on her skin fissure into roots,
sweetness, dormant in her veins eroding into dirt.

Gabled roofs wrangle her hands as
they become limp, harvested into

withered seeds and chipped in the wind.
Chopsticks and brushstroke fracture, fashioning

into lifelines sprawled like limbs, crooked paths;
the cobblestones fork into diverging omens, slashed

with concrete roads and creases in her palm. The Yangtze River spills into roots, flooding
porcelain bowls, suffocating the plums— sour yet sweet, buried

like proverbs in the dirt.

Self-Portrait as Mutant We fear the fidgeting of GMOs, spider DNA in the corn, crab DNA in the goat milk. One by one our genes are ticking off and on, dazzling broken Christmas lights, deciding: green eyes for this baby, an extra rib for that one. Magic powers, a maybe. Born with mutations you might not see,…

Imagine you have a story to tell. It’s a story about hope, loss, tragedy, and courage. It’s your story. Now imagine trying to write this story having grown up in a country where education was denied to you, where telling your story has been criminalized. And then picture writing it in a second language. The…

Ashen face in a doorframe and a memory of flame (something unresolved)— Would you know me? Would I know you in your new form? Is this an invention, a number I didn’t call? My cowardice as doppelgänger given form A violent rainstorm leaves the earth upturned —I wanted them back but not like this. It’s always…

Our Honeymoon

was a strand of scenic overlooks. 
I first wrote strange

       —a strange of scenic overlooks—

my mistake, and strange enough 
was everything bathed in the red 
Mars dust of Sedona,
the iron in the rocks aligned 
with iron in our blood,
they say, so it tugs on us.
It tugged. Every night
on Airport Mesa, a crowd gathered 
and the Milky Way made a white mess 
of the sky. Was I the only one
who’d wanted to polish it
black again? Our honeymoon
was a scene of stranded overlooks.
We posed for panoramic
photographs minus the photographs. 
Behind us the canyon was banded 
red, copper, purple

       —millions of years
       of compressed sunsets—

where the river had gnawed 
down to bone, down
to its strange, scenic marrow.

Indiana Boys

The soybean fields flooded and froze over,
and the boys—not yet their father’s sons, not yet

worrying about crop stubble beneath the ice— 
skate, twilight settling in their hair,

until their mother, watching at the window, 
calls them in for supper. When it’s dark

they’ll sit elbow-to-elbow at the worn farm table 
each son will want when she’s gone,

ringing spoons against the sides of bowls,
that silver-on-ceramic note. But now they glide

across the ice, not yet worrying about surfaces 
that barely hold them, and there is nothing

between them and their mother but the clear
syrup of old glass. It moves so slowly, no one sees.

The Parable of the Bear

Beloveds, I keep picturing it
this way: we’re standing, all of us,

between the Bear and every creature 
the Bear calls prey, and half of us

step aside. Half of us aren’t enough
to hold the Bear. It lumbers,

then, in a blur of claws and mange, 
charges through. What did you think

would happen? The Bear would lose 
its appetite? The Bear might be tamed

with a tiny bicycle, a propeller hat,
a gold sphere to balance on its nose?

I don’t need to describe what happens 
next: the smell of blood, the surprise

of white femur. Ones I have called 
beloved, I keep picturing you

this way: sitting off to one side, 
watching the Bear work, waiting to see

if it leaves any meat on the bones.

“…And I should love you the more because I mangled you And because you were no longer beautiful To anyone but me.” – The Love Song of St. Sebastian T.S. Eliot Lining each path, each road stop and roadway we traverse here, wake-robins exhibit folds thick with lashes of redemption. Coarse flint beneath supports our beatific…

We were neurophobic and perfect the day that we lost our souls Maybe we weren’t so humanBut If we cry we will rustAnd I was a hand grenadeThat never stopped explodingYou were automatic and as hollow as the “o” in god —“Mechanical Animals,” Marilyn Manson No, no notice arrived in the mail. No, we did…