This collection took me a bit to feel the vibes. Tibble’s poems are honest, heartfelt, and humorous. She is a young poet with so much potential. I’ll definitely go back for a second read.

To get the number of pages for the dynamic portions, I logged into MODX admin and started with the Faculty Working Papers. The record shows 1,404 pages. Since SiteImprove crawled 2,098 pages and the Faculty Working Papers alone take 70% of the total pages, I wanted to dig a bit further into the database. The MySQL table for content shows a total of 5,164 pages (these included everything from public to hidden to unpublished pages).

Here are the numbers for the current dynamic portions:

• Faculty Working Papers: 1404 pages
• Course Catalog: 373 pages
• Course Schedules: 72 pages (Backend programming is required to import the Excel file (CSV) into the database (MySQL) and populate an HTML table for the course schedules)
• Student Organizations: 70 pages
• JD Focus Areas & Concentrations: 18 pages
• Class Notes: 70 pages
• Clinic & Externships: 15 pages
• People Finder (Dynamically pulled from faculty, admin & staff directories in MODX as well as linking to bios and departments outside of MODX)

There’s a body marching toward mine.
I can feel its breasts and stomach, hot

against my back. Its breath in my hair.
I accumulate bodies—my own.

The tattoo braceleting my wrist.
My earlobe like a pin hole camera.

My vagina, untouched. My vagina,
stretched. So many bodies treading

toward the others. And the bruises I conceal
with makeup and denial. The scars I inflict

on myself, and the ones I contort
with a mirror to see. I didn’t always know

we’d be joined like this—that I couldn’t
leave any of myself behind.

In Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance
a performer raises both arms like a bailora

and shifts her weight from hip to hip, knee
to knee, ankle to ankle, until she softly

collides with another dancer. The two travel
forward, pelvis to sacrum, stylized fingers

flared overhead, until they meet a third woman
and touch her back like stacked spoons.

Dressed in identical white pants and long
sleeves, the dancers repeat the steps

until, single file, five women shuffle
forward-they go no further.

The dance lasts the exact length of Bob Dylan’s
rendition of “Early Mornin’ Rain.”

How many versions of myself pile
into the others, arms lifted in surrender,

torsos twisting to the harmonica?
But the dancers—I’m moved by their strange

conga line. A train of women traversing
the stage, running gently into a wall.

Ama Codjoe

I feel naive when I think of it now,
how carelessly I stood before him,

like a ballet dancer in a dressing room
bright with the backs of other girls.

This was before the coldness he nursed
and kept warm between his thighs.

I waited too long for a thaw—he waited too.
Taking him into my mouth, I knew the ache

of winter. I heard the silences
grow as a field of stones between us.

When I look back at my body, young
in the bedroom dark, lit by a perpetual city,

I am gripping a rock in my right hand
and he is gripping a rock in his right hand.

We face each other, muscles poised for sex
or war. Who dropped the rock?

Who cast it? I’m unsure,
even now, who cried mercy first.

Ama Codjoe

I was newly naked: aware of myself
as a separate self, distinct from dirt and bone.

I had not hands enough,
and so, finally, uncrossed my arms.

In trying to examine one body part,
I’d lose sight of another. I couldn’t

imagine what I looked like during
the fractured angles of sex.

At the river’s edge, it was impossible
to see all of myself at once.

I began to understand nakedness
as a feeling.

It was a snake, loose and green;
it was the snake skin, coiled and discarded.

The shedding chained itself
like a balloon ribboned to a child’s wrist.

Morning’s birdsong reminded me
of the sloughing off of skin.

The rumored beauty of my husband’s first
wife never bothered me before.

I missed the sensation of being fixed
in amber. Then the hair in the comb,

fingernail clippings, the red mole on my
left breast grown suddenly bigger.

I perceived my likeness in everything:
the lines on my palm as the veins

of a leaf, my mind as a swarm of flies
humming over something sugary or dead,

my vulnerability as the buck
I’d kill, then wrap myself inside,

my hair as switchgrass, twine, and nest,
a roving cloud my every limb.

Ama Codjoe

Chen Chen writes about being a queer Chinese American. He opens up about his identity and family. His interactions with his mother on his sexual preference are hilarious. His honesty and humor come to across in this collection.

What if, Betye, instead of a rifle or hand
grenade—I mean, what if after
the loaded gun that takes two hands
to fire, I lay down the splintered broom
and the steel so cold it wets
my cheek? What if I unclench the valleys
of my fist, and lay down
the wailing baby?
Gonna burn the moon in a cast-iron skillet.
Gonna climb the men who, when they see my face, turn into stony mountains.
Gonna get out of the kitchen.
Gonna try on my nakedness like a silk kimono.
Gonna find me a lover who eats nothing but pussy.
Let the whites of my eyes roll, roll.
Gonna clench my toes.
Gonna purr beneath my own hand.
Gonna take down my hair.
Try on a crown of crow feathers.
Gonna roam the wide aisles of the peach grove, light dripping off branches like syrup, leaves brushing the fuzz on my arms.
—You dig?—
Gonna let the juice trickle down my chin.
Gonna smear the sun like war paint across my chest.
Gonna shimmy into a pair of royal blue bell-bottoms.
Gonna trample the far-out thunderclouds, heavy in their lightness.
Watch them slink away.
Gonna grimace.
Gonna grin.
Gonna lay down my sword.
Pick up the delicate eggs of my fists.
Gonna jab the face that hovered over mine.
It’s easy to find the lips, surrounded as they are in minstrel black.
Gonna bloody the head of every god, ghost, or swan who has torn into me—pried me open with its beak.
Gonna catch my breath in a hunting trap.
Gonna lean against the ropes.
Gonna break the nose of mythology.
—Goodnight John-Boy—
Gonna ice my hands in April’s stream.
Gonna scowl and scream and shepherd my hollering into a green pasture.
Gonna mend my annihilations into a white picket fence.
Gonna whip a tornado with my scarlet handkerchief.
Spin myself dizzy as a purple-lipped drunkard.
Gonna lay down, by the riverside, sticky and braless in the golden sand.

Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.
Ain’t gonna study war no more.

Ama Codjoe

We Are Mermaids from Stephanie Burt, a Professor of English at Harvard, is compelling, thrilling, and daring. She writes openly about trans sex and literature. What I loved most from this collection are poems on punctuation marks. I’ll definitely reread this book again in the near future.

The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,

said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening, I

heard it, I felt it
like temperature,
all said in a
whisper—build to-

morrow, make right be-
fall, you are not
free, other scenes
are not taking

place, time is not filled,
time is not late, there is
a thing the emptiness
needs as you need

emptiness, it
shrinks from light again &
again, although all things
are present, a

fact a day a
bird that warps the
arithmetic of per-
fection with its

arc, passing again &
again in the evening
air, in the pre-
vailing wind, making no

mistake—yr in-
difference is yr
principal beauty
the mind says all the

time—I hear it—I
hear it every-
where. The earth
said remember

me. I am the
earth it said. Re-
member me.

Jorie Graham

After Toyota dealer provided a list of recommendations for repair and tune up, I took my minivan to Khang Auto for the following services:

• Replace 6 spark plugs (tune up)
• Replace right front axle
• Replace 2 lower ball joints
• AC service
• Check alarm horn

Total cost: $1,200

It was still a big cost, but much less that $7,723.93 the dealer had quoted. Another big item left to do is replacing the timing cover gasket. The dealer quote was $4,200.79. I will try to get this one done in the near future. I wanted to keep this car for as long as I can. Hopefully, it won’t cost me too much more to maintain. I don’t want to spend another $50,000 or $60,000 for a brand new car. Depending on a vehicle sucks.