The Marriage is Survived by Both a Husband and a Wife Once I wrote a list to steel my mind What I should do if you kill yourselfHid the list at K’s house, preparing for the truth avalanching toward ustext my boss / tell our kids / fly in a friend /schedule more therapy / […]
Strangers at a Bar in Chicago on a dance floora man walks up to me says i remind himof everything about his sonhe pauses a bit when i demanda doorway to his memory—he was just like you he says againwe were so close yet distantin the neon colored light of the clubbodies stack in pairs […]
I plant runner beans on the eighth floor It strikes me this is the kind of kindnessyou would do to someone else’s body.One month later, lung-shaped leaves have green-stretched and orange-scattershot themselves acrossthe balcony, panting with coiled pleasurein thirty degrees, carbon dioxide- drunk. Meanwhile, I have questions I don’t ask.Will we sink or swim. That’s […]
Destiny Is Destiny The recliner, that witherednavy dog, pancaked to accommodateEsther & her decay. Its adjustable anglesdulled the blades that sliced her guts. When the doctors said bagels are fine butonly plain, I heard the engine turn coldin my grandmother’s mind – Boy,these are some young doctors, and anyway,what’s a bagel without seeds? When she […]
The Aliens Watch the Mother Dream Tonight’s watching arrests us,makes us think. She bolts in bedsuddenly, her heart mammal, muskrat;she’s feral, a small bird with a smallerheart, she wakes, blinks several timesin the dark. We are silent, studying. Watch her there,as we observe what we know is languageunformed beneath her shallow breathing,notice her thought move […]
For All Mankind I assemble shrinesto the porous limestone; corpse of seaspongesundried, scentless; bonerigid around tunnels;ceramics, unglazed—women leak, that is our nature I, myself, still feel the tugof milk, pulling itself through my left breast when the cryof a child catches meaccidentally on a newsfeed weeping the fat ofmy own bodybegging, begging to servein ways […]
On (Still Not) Coming Out I try to anticipate the woundfor the second time. I ask the nurse ifI launch across handlebars, flay a tooth,will spring stems break from cement?he says every stoplight’sblood-thick tongue bites before itforgives. dogs pant in front yardsfacing the sky so I’ll heal without marks:I can pick the thread color for […]
A Quiet Passing [I] at night he tells me about the people he’s killed, about the boyby the river, the woman in her mud & thatch hut, the manhiding in the sharkskin grasslands after dinner we kiss & cuddle, we no longer make love,it is too much, too much to hold & to cradlewithin my […]
No Backsies the extra-large mini-fridge starts up a shimmywhile I’m mid-sentence with my father on the phoneI roll my shoulders against my freshman year cinder block dorm wallsand the ceiling splits—in pokes the head of the Dolphin That Cannot Lie my roommate’s Grapenuts box leaps from the shaking fridgeand out spill my preschool paintings, plastic […]
