Still in the absence of wind and cosmic touch lies the lonely prints with earth above as witness, but there’s no confetti raining down, where noise becomes still.

He who feeds the soil knows not that I hold him so, between my roots, a bulb of cradle earth in mouth and eyes and all

I used to take the Strassenbahn from my apartment to my work where I was paid to focus on odd books as an accounting clerk.

To my cousin, Vinny, sleeping over, you and I were eight beneath the covers with our flashlights

I can’t claim to know the makings of Godly hands: Perhaps they’re fibers, coarsened by fresh silk or leather, resistance to water or bloodshed.

I would have left behind sweat drops like breadcrumbs, crisscross footsteps along country trails

When my tongue was still hog-tied from Liberia’s civil war, you unknotted my colloquialism and syntax,

I dotted my i’s & crossed my t’s 2X — 3X before my naturalization

I fight against the years, wear my memories like exhausted Hawaiian shirts, my body, a putty-colored afghan.

Some women remind me of cities, and like cities each has a unique character

As the keynote speaker begins talkin about a risk management framework for AI ecosystems,

Driving down Highway 1 along the California Coast Where beat poets came to commune with nature.

The trident lightning arrestor looks more constant than before— besieged by discomfort, bygone joys and pain—a belief flowing endlessly into the future.

In Kolkata, heat arrived as silence, thick, smothering. The days clung to us, draped like wet cloth, the evenings stitched with the hum of cicadas, their voices dense, layered, as if holding the weight of something breaking.

If you visit my mother’s village there is nothing much to see. There is a banyan older than my great-grandfather’s thoughts, a few houses older than a few cities, a temple older than my mother and boundless rice fields larger than the dreams of the farmers there.

I'm perched on a branch of my heart, like a question. Letters summon me— Why now, this flux of families And a city of the sun Beneath?

The woman I don’t recognize is back in my bed. She quotes Tolstoy.

I bought her products called Ocean Wind, a line of all blue shower gel, shampoo and conditioner

She hadn't met a man Who could easily Lift her off her feet, Make her float in mid-air Above the trees,

Nothing wakens faster than a drowsy dog sussing, through an open window, the stabbing screams of an animal,