For make my lips red like strawberry For cool me off and calm be down afta all dis and all dat Just enough hope for me to think that yes we can do this and do that with all we have or don't have Just enough time for finish my poem For da dis of…

The flames have leapt from point to point unabated: first our eyes then our ears, into our hearts into our spleens, our insides scorched. We fight each other. Fear blinds us. Put the fires out. They have burned for eight years. Let the great healing begin.

They warned them about us, about me. We were one of them. Not to be trusted, they said. Don’t talk so loud, she said. Speak English, she said. So I went to my room and hid my dolls with wobbly heads. They’ll be coming, don’t you doubt it, they’ll be coming and we’ll be blamed…

An old canvas bag tucked in between tattered boxes lying on the floor of the storage room crisscrossed by cobwebs: I’m selling the family house. The canvas is yellow, splotched with brown hues covered with dust from the ages. Whose canvas bag? I untie the knot that holds the heavy contents: standard sized hammer, medium…

That remains a mystery to me: the nature of dark matter—MACHOs or Massive Compact Halo Objects, WIMPs orWeakly Interacting Massive Particles and neutrinos, those billion to one particles for every proton and electron in the universe, the nature of dark energy—cosmological constant, scalar fields energizing the accelerating expansion of the universe the reality of hyperspace…