Mesa Star Chevron Gas Station
Mesa, Arizona
to bend
to edge
to bow
to restrain
to end
tall grasses
brittlebush
camphorweed
pricklyleaf
paperflowers
a knee
a handful
a nod
a sheaf
& sign
give way to yards folded
mulch red some selvage
hang flags then hang him
documented lullaby
here & here & here
On September 15, four days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Frank Roque told a waiter at Applebee’s: ‘I’m going to go out & shoot some towel heads,’ and ‘We should kill their children, too, because they’ll grow up to be like their parents.’ Roque murdered Balbir Singh Sodhi as he was planting flowers outside his gas station.
Divya Victor is the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book Thug), a book of verse, prose memoir, lyric essay and visual objects; NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow, Winner of the Bob Kaufman Award), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her chapbooks include Semblance and Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place. Her criticism and commentary have appeared in Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, Jacket2, and The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet. Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including, more recently, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, and boundary2. Her poetry has been translated into French and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State University and Editor at Jacket2. She is currently at work on a project commissioned by the Press at Colorado College.