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.
Read Morethe 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.
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