I have been waiting to become a better writer so that I can understand them.

The forecast predicted devastation,
So I scattered sandbags around my house,
Closed the window,
And waited for the deluge.
Fingers gripped my hair and
Yanked me back like a bucking

The first shall be last and the last shall be first, Frank said / that’s from episode 42 / 
of the telly series Kung Fu, /  ‘This Valley Has Terror’

Sex is the opposite of being a novelist, and I would rather live between them.

Being an artist is just another phase, / like a kid who eats the glue sticks

Maybe next era I’ll get to experience love.

Stripper show / Hostess bar / Karaoke club

But there’s no cup, no / kitchen. Just one mouldy / statue, dreaming of television.

Torn textbooks at Widener Library or seeping 
Inkwells those Cajal axons 

out in the Everglades, no resurrection
just a rotting boy's corpse

the day i was born i was yellow and poisoned and anxious.
and they put me under a sunlamp and burned it out of me.

Drug Plane

I was fifteen, then sixteen, then twenty. My high-school friend was my now college roommate. His stepfather was less mysterious but more compelling. He was having trouble with his

We are like dogs in a dog park, smelling each other, breathing together

We're asked to think about examples of unconscious bias and I think about the guy who goes to

Heaven but it's Chinese.

Last spring was the last spring.

Neither a drop of white wine into the danube canal, nor a gunshot through the roof of my mouth, but something in between

I am more deserving of your love than he is. My heart beats twice the size of others. 

I put away my matchsticks / and hammer. You remain, standing / the same as you were.

when I laugh, you perk up
like a misted lily

there’s always something new to say

At Bryn Mawr I was taught never to use CAPS / I dawn my lips / and paint my toes / red as a manifestos

behold a God's eye in storm where tapping rings / finish me.

Lies are told beneath silvery moons
And far beyond sad boys and girls falling in love.

Before the internet had all the answers,
before Siri, before Alexa,
before TikTok teens with ring lights
explained the universe in under thirty seconds—
I had my dad.

Dad was my Wikipedia.
Dad

Look longingly
out the window. Wait for myself to come home.