poetry

In Stieglitz’s little photographs, sunlight
oozes through scraps of cloud. Dark
presses against light; the spaces wobble
between positive and negative.

Smoked salmon on buttered bread, a steak brushed
with olive oil and turned twice over a roaring fire,

Do you ever get that feeling like something bad just happened but
you forgot what it was?

once I owned a wooden door
& a field of ice & I was big-hearted, gentle, prefaced
my friends’ names with sweet & kissed them

and I have never | wanted so instantly | so much
as to be this heterosexual | doctor who scoops

I wish I were as fabulous as Titus 
removing a pair of sunglasses

Imagine my surprise to find I’m the only one of me here:
then imagine the exact opposite of that, my lips curled

Maybe he can reshape the doors. Maybe he can carry me through.

The first time you died, your friends
searched the universe to bring you home

He calls again to say he’s upset I’m making it
difficult for him to feel close to her. How I

a hammer to hold onto its handle,
a Phillips head to cozy up

My chest, a jar
of honey knifed

In shorthand, words are written as they are pronounced. Know is written no, say is written sa, sew is written so (GREGG Shorthand Manual Simplified, 1949).

In shorthand, words are written as they are pronounced. Know is written no, say is written sa, sew is written so (GREGG Shorthand Manual Simplified, 1949).

Tonight is my turn, the mattress on the floor stacked with pillows like a pyre
in a field of cotton. Because I’m not your only lover, when you touch me,

Postfeminismus

Silence becomes word
drop by drop

look
look at this -

Hey you
in the aggravated suit: Did you ever steal
something? And I mean something. Something

i.
My lover & I need
to cross a bridge.
It is chained closed
for the night. My lover
climbs over leaves me
to hunt antelope

once a stiletto stitched a stab wound
on the underside of my heart
when it finally grew hair again, no one could see the scar

But he’s lying—
no longer will dawn
be a sparkling hush

At fifteen, my first boyfriend
forced an earthquake
into my foundation. Entertained

We exist down a road three miles from nowhere in particular, south of where we were born, north of one gulf, in the midst of others. So much blood in this dirt. So much green in the air: tornado season all year. Imagine a cedar tree taller than wind. Imagine a buffet of oaks:

I decide to write more poems
about my father’s dick. I’ve seen it before

birth, the pupil of my mother’s eye a part of mine then.
We must have stared at it, erect with purpose, plunging

How many times have I been told
to bow like a man
with my hands straight at my sides
& held back as I bend?

Plastic Easter eggs strewn across a lawn barren
but blades of grass.

After surgery, her body weighted against
a wooden chair, eyes mid-blink, her face
curtained by a dark mass of hair, Frida lets
out curls of smoke from the left hand’s cigarette.

We were storms inside.

I was picturing an ash-red winter
& no one could stop me.

I arrange trinkets on a foldaway chair
a lock of your hair the handle of a teacup
the nub of a candle from the winter I ate
only mints and stones and mourned our dog

In dating and quantum mechanics,
a sure thing is no thing at all.
Examined, possibilities collapse: one brilliant
array of electron collision

I learned from Shayla’s older sister
that food sweetens on the tongue
when (yes those strawberries tasted
like a sugar spill of blood and seeds)

Wandering through the meadow searching for places where the dirt shows through— looking to where the trees touch the sky, thinking everything must be written in the grasses.

At an outdoor table set for a child’s tea party, a little blonde girl is using a saw to slice a ham inscribed with the words “Corpus Christi,” which is Latin for body of Christ.

Last night I wrote about a boy
on the side of the highway selling

Get out. Look at the moon,
your lucky red penny. One day the world

Who deserves the desert of their own intellect?
The detailed map of our deterioration

In this one I’ve just put my beer down on an amp
and it’s crackling. She’s saying

We could have lengthened our year by three hours, improved our float
in a failing atmosphere. As I understand it, you have a nucleus and a head

You know that lemonade you make from powder
I know a guy that would pour it dry into his palm

When it happens & you
have no notification

The sun hung from a noose
and all the blackflies were swarming
and was it so hard, leaving, did

two hours slept in the past two days
& aren’t we too old for this

When we met, you said

you wanted a woman

who could kill you.

Worst. Therapy. Couch. Ever. I got off
my stool at The Android’s Dungeon
for this? Allow me to introduce myself.

She molders. Shrouded in seabirds and the stink
of the sand. Dynamite, leeward heave-ho
tucked beneath her ribs, a jail for urchins.

Where through the window can god see this
catastrophe of love? I want him to see it. I want
to show him my kneecaps so he’ll know he’s a fraud.

I want to emulate the timbre
of Newman’s squeal,

There was nothing in that drawer
except for what we would put there.

Those were the spare years. An annuity
of silence. Allow them that space. Allow
the years to collect like barrels of rain,
an oily and blue backdrop in the yard.

I stand stiff as a sparrow,
cane hard as a tree branch
in my hand.

Little boy full of beetles,
girl with lightning hair,

It’s like being in love All he wants are dogs
The author tells us how he feels stoned in his

You will go between swift ships, tall ships, my friend—a blackbird on the battlements, ready to risk your life for Caesar’s. Maecenas, what about us?

Sometimes, I see a man standing
with his back to me, and I read
youth in the slant of his spine,

We’re warned all water drains to sewers.
In rivers, fathers who escape
the house wash hands after weeding.

At night, the fission loves us, lathers us over,
makes our teeth glow like low watt lanterns in the dark of our beds.

coming to some crooked
sense here in the end room,
a currency,

Just row houses roped in with seatbelts,
No hope but an answer of a riddle.

Now I’m supposed to love myself,
clasp these hands together
as if they weren’t made to cup

Why do Chopin’s fingers slip into the piano keys
seamlessly as gondolas into a canal? The étude
of our loneliness begins with rainfall and dwindles to sand.

I spy, I spy that dream I should not be watching.
On each red rope of the swimming pool, dicks,
dicks, and more dicks. I swim and try to hold my breath

Our friends build a fire on the beach again.
We eye the drunkest one. He has a habit
of throwing sand on the blaze whenever his girl

Did I get your eyes right
in yesterday’s poem?

I’m tired of thinking of all you dead.
The black masks of your graves,
the visions you stir in me.

before the sky has gone to weeping, the trees
are scarred & bleeding sap. Chewed to ruin
by moths building tents in their leaves.

around 1, behind the H & M,
to send hot Caleb from Chem 6
who texted me a pic of his cousin in a ski mask

I’m offered a water, and a tea, so I take both, because I’m thirsty. And the more options the better,
or so I tell myself.

On the streets, these crowded lines of stores
and delivery trucks idling, the backfire
of my manager’s Chevy is my father’s hand

The forest is never silent. Each rock
waits its turn. The river misleads:
impatience is rare. In the valley,

Christopher’s Bar is all full up and Liquor World is closed already.
So I wander down the avenue looking for someplace to take me in,
clutching a Brautigan in my coat in case I need some conversation.

Now it’s all smoke and climbing high
into the tree-houses of the unconscious,

He took my hand, led me to the bathroom, opened the door and slipped in. The bathroom was dark. Through the partially opened window, an apartment with a yellow breakfast nook.

Infection. I loll my head to the side in
the dim stillness, you loll your head into
mine.

Kenneth has his pecker out
again. We can see him
from the window, twisting his hips

I won a fraternity kissing contest
in college. I still have the photo—
chubby dumpling me, squeezed

Today I am staying in my t-shirt and underwear
with so much sadness
in every ounce of my body,

Swimming laps in the sound to erase the head
cold he can’t seem to shake. Small doses

As I stand in line at the bank
an armored car pulls up and the guard comes in.

They do not make iced coffee here
and Fox News is bolted to the ceiling,
cranky as an old crow.

I used to sleep with this guy who studied Japanese ghosts in literature. He’d talk about them while I was trying to go to sleep and the names stuck in my head long after I’d forgotten his.

the sun went down about a half mile from here. 1
we watched it settle over the houses and fall away,

finally, into the shoulders of every living thing around.
the rain sings insistence, sings like a tinfoil package

Everything in baseball is measurable:
Men stand sixty-feet-six-inches from the pitching rubber
with pine-tarred bats & dirty palms.

Something about travel
makes us lighter. We drive
to Missouri, and I discover

As families arrive comics rehearse bits. As
bar-backs fold towels. As napkins and bottles
are checked and emptied. As another ticket

The lack of an atmosphere, a planet
viewed against the blackness of space.
I didn’t choose to sleep at Taco Bell

When we learned
about the earth in orbit
and began to feel ourselves

In the side yard of an apartment house,
a length of twine extended from a downspout
to the trunk of sapling, and hung upon it
in the motionless air, an array of lacy
intimate garments, as they are sometimes called

Her jewelry always gets clumped
together in the jewelry box,
chains clutch each other,
odd earrings lodged in the links.

A quake bucks
against the flush plates
of my heel, up

New Orleans, you beautiful bitch, you.
When the shattered rattle of the road
ricochets too hard, you always

my father’s death wish)
smoke blown into the thinness
of my face

Timing is everything, as they say,
though who they is I don’t know,
but the fact that you didn’t see me

Like us, the hard-charging businessman is having dinner
on the terrace of the hotel at Mycenae, only he is taking

I live in endless theorem. I live relentless correction. You didn’t tell me that we could sell the art: fiscal touching, fiscal touching in the courtyard. It elicits a response. Looking around the house peeling the wallpaper off, all so salable.

Crowded on a pull out bed, we
paired, hairbrushes and color palettes
in hand, going to work on the other,
pulled glossy rivulets from scalps,