Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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Notes
The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.
From the Archives
Poetry • Winter 2016 - Danger
Few understood the fire
and no one warned those
who walked toward it
or the spectators that gathered
on rooftops and balconies to watch
the wind carry it in dull waves
Every light becomes a celebration
at night when time worn thin
rips under the weight of measuring hands
The beams and walls of houses
now diminished outlines
left open welcoming late guests
Around the fire pit
the air regains its shape
and rests a heavy coat
the relief when darkness gives you warmth
and in its hold there is no need
To be seen a shadow or a body
Poetry • Winter 2015 - Possession
I pick my gap-toothed cunt up off the floor.
I can feel it in my lap, trembling there
like a small insect.
Oh cut the crap dear cunt, I tell it.
The time it took the ocean to carve this valley,
that was one day in the life of a cunt.
Cunt of cordage and rigging, of shock
and sigh of wave. Then, yes—
with such strangeness it opens,
gives name to the sounds that rise early
at my window: wind and leaf
and leafblower and the opened husk
of sun. The cunt could name mountains,
but its paper wings just beat and beat.
Poetry • Fall 2014
down the sink : rushed water
funnels after fish entrails, or grease gives
a type of collapse
inward, frying in a pan
fennel-seasoned. An equation equates
oil and flowers, fields and division. Descent
is a disintegration by parts. What is missing?
I want to peer down at myself from above
and point out algae. How my grandfather
took me to the pond
for the gutting of it—
one blink’s worth too much. Why isn’t there
more inside? Why isn’t there more to bleed,
protrude, be stripped? All these still stalks
come from somewhere. Fennel was a field,
was a marathon, was a death in a field
under clouds of phosphate.
I slice a fish
sideways and grasp at the inside. Now
things go quickly, death is its own mass
and caves in time toward the event, and
viewed from without,
each second slows to a whisper
never to cross
over. Here. Here seem all horizons
to end the same, bundled up in one ribbon
tucked between the teeth and tongue.
Poetry • Fall 2014
as if eaten away
beyond the storm
overwhelmingly
searing colors
beating back clouds
fixed by light
cleaning wounds
stroke deeply & clear
eddy of dark water
today with cancer
the shroud lifts
menacing brush
here a guest
the season ends
pulled out of sight
uncharacteristic
in water, silhouettes
(tears, shriek, hush)
uncomposed
it doesn’t affect you
a canvas corner
strokes against realism
appearance of blood
that swan in the sky
a pupil’s bridges
turning in wind
raise their oars
a thick cocktail
scans came back
you unravel
2026