I’ll Always Make Love to the Mississippi.

We bruised
my knees on the bluff.

I’ve disappeared into the current
of loving nothing
but tainted water lapping against rotten fish
against a rocky

Stuffed cracks in ground with paper towels

I used to chew on blocks of wood
crying that the dentist has gone away from town.
*
My mouth would open wide
for sparkling birds and insects to enter

“Timothée Chalamet and Lily-Rose Depp Make Out, Eat Fried Chicken”

They are busy galocher-ing on 2nd Avenue
I am on the sidewalk looking at the sky

They are stopping to wipe their mouths
it

i'm in love with the thousand yard stare
deeply towards the worn fold
of the catcher's glove

I pause from scraping frost
off the car, and watch my gray
emissions wisp away

into the chill. I miss strict
seasons, and knowing
what to wear. Last week, it was 72.

When will summer

A Hopeful Young Man on a Job Interview

I’m broke and eating chocolate ice cream out of a novelty helmet
I’m sweating because I’m wearing a sweater in the heat
to cover up the insane poison ivy on

Just that instant
when thinking becomes
too much

Drive-in movie theater, Merrillville, Indiana, 1989

Field of Dreams on a screen bigger than every building in Merrillville,  

my brother and I eating chocolate sundaes from mini Dairy Queen

In Praise of Hands

I miss hands. I miss their flimsy, awkward quality –

the way one looks when offered while still searching

for a reason. I miss being young, lining up after the

"[ / ]" and "[ / / ]"

In the middle of
the street is everyone
you know.

Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.

All the time I don’t know what I’ve lost. 

Is this how a woman
Disappears, water-tap and soil

There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.

She flips a stool on the bar like a lamb
 

There’s so much advice
in the world, such as: if you’re feeling
very low, put on a suit

I made a call
and I lived. 
It was the longest
life of my life.

Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow

One of your axolotls has eaten the other
and every week you clean its twenty-litre tank
of cannibal excrement.

i look like eurotrash
in your red sweatshirt
and blue sweat shorts but

tree tree tree tree calvin calv hobbes

A man was arrested for creating a labyrinth in an IKEA.

doesn’t know how to give a PROPER blowjob
The spittle
of the sea
                        otherwise known as Jamaica Pond
dries hard on her eros:erring:elbow still deeper
resonating
in her

there was no fiddle, but let’s say there was.