You were a combustible thing. This overcast morning I ascend the site of a volcanic vent, where the neighborhood crows roost atop cinder cones….

“‘Queen Latifah is sexy.’ It really is an accident. I don’t think much of it when I say it. It is the truth.”

“filling Lowe's bins with soil and zucchini and no blooming brings my painted poogle back from the pound…”

“climbing toward / the night / my body / shatters / into stars. “

“I don’t like writing about sex. I’ve done it, of course. I mean, yes, I’ve done IT and I’ve done it, that is, write about it. And I’ll probably do it again, write about sex, I mean.”

“At 4 am, on your bed, I turn to you and say, if the robot in me malfunctions–here are my twelve seconds for today;”

“I have found that the complexity of the suffering that pain induces impossible to capture fully in one dimension, using a single medium. Pain is multi- dimensional, hyper-subjective, and defies definitions. It requires a multi-modal approach for translation.”

Three is the lucky number of our hearts this V Day. Here’s Monique Quintana’s “Crow Triptych” in three lockets.

“This math has a vivid history. Fractals
become fractions in the alchemy of race”

“i worry sometimes of the ways these lives, thin like papel picado, muddle together.”

“m i n o t a u r h o o f

b u l k h o r n e d a n d

b e n t o n d e s t r u c t i o n”

“Desire is no foreign thing to immigrants

or queers.”

“But sometimes you need to fall to find yourself.”

“I bury my hatred in the graveyard

I water my hatred with vinegar

I fertilize my hatred with salt”

“manufactured as distillations of minerals, amalgamates in a vortex of alloys breaking the latticed molding; “how doth the little busy bee” improve multiverses as invader and reciprocator.”

“…Oh if you insist Mrs. Funnynose
I will sit to tea and mudcakes
with you, soaked to the drawers
in the warm shallows
of this pink, cloved,
round-bellied afternoon.”

“Self love: a frothing sea.”

“My best friend said the only way she’d find God
is if she got locked up in prison, & she’d pick
Jesus over the rest because he has the most
subscribers.”

“And as the foam bubbles up in its foam agony

The sea’s gallop is here again, a naked symphony”

from Diary Poems

“What I knew, and what my old instructor had intuited, was that I needed a change of environment to make progress. You cannot move forward in the writing if you remain still in the world, my professor had written in his email.“