BEFORE LIFT OFF

Before the plane’s wheels begin spooling air
in an act of contrition 

as if to... more

All day I look forward to hours of empty house
then I’m there and the whole place itches. I go
not home but the place that tries so hard to feel like it.

reasons why my father sent me a picture of a dead coyote

to start a conversation

to assuage my... more

Please Hold

I’m patiently unraveling
on the phone while the automated service
explains overdraft... more

First Week of April, Los Angeles
(as transcribed from the iCalendar “what really happened”)

1
got... more

1. A poem about desire

a man in the airport looking at women
ponytails and leggings
how combustible... more

mirror

an estimated 52% of internet traffic
is composed of bots & i am in love
with everyone i... more

10,000 years from now

two men will be
digging
in the ground
and they’ll find
a frisbee
buried... more

to gain followers I use my body then / I lose them with my poems

while i / in half-lotus / pluck stubble from / my belly

Nostalgia style: you miss your Double Double
before you even take a bite. You know
burgers become slimy wax paper crumbles,
babies become toddlers, toddlers become

i only do the poet voice / when i'm hungover

Rain drags its cage / through the neighborhood. You / see nothing but // trenches. Rusty shovels, / the alien rocks sprayed / like genitals. 

For weeks after, I watched California burn / out my window & on the evening news & the ash // in my cheeks became the only way/ to pronounce home.

My dog keeps biting me when he’s scared / and, like anyone, is always scared.

We’ve never lived in Culver’s territory and it still doesn’t

feel like we do. I mean, it’s at 33^rd and Iowa and our place
is at 9^th and Indiana. That’s like a 15-minute drive.

With the bobby pin I’ve kept beneath my tongue all morning, / my fingers spring the lock to my parent’s bedroom // where mom’s cherry lipstick glows beneath a seashell lamp. 

I am hairpin volcanoes and ugly seahorses. / A rejected and quaking paradise. A pile of aged-rafter / forearms. I am not a house, but a chaos of candy bones.  

New Jersey as land of claws & fangs & deep fields of grass that stumble onto the side of the highway // New Jersey as fields of soft dirty ice // New Jersey as blondhairblueeyes slapping you in the face at lunch in the cafeteria in front of all your friends

I’ve mooned away my marriage, / grounded it, ripped the fuselage / in two, or is the better metaphor
to say I heard the countdown go / from ten to zero and didn’t even / try to stop my wife from breaking / the gravity of disaster planet me?

Some of space is made of diamond. / Some, of booze.

Field Notes in Haiku

I hear a giant
lives in a stardew valley
I follow the signs:

a knot... more

In this plastic bayou we’re not customers,
we’re guests. POPEYES GUEST 138,
YOUR ORDER IS READY. Guests, yes,
but also numbers—we’re not in Panera

you know me like an artifact

1

[meimei’s a meatness sis slug of blood boat the body tiger the teeth selfie tongue selfie chintilt selfie lilt her lily pucker... more