I ended up in right field, ponytail eschew, cap falling to the bridge of my nose, shadowing my freckled cheeks.

I don’t think it made a sound.

The Beaches Are Made of Fish Bone Here

and Candlewood Lake used to be a town, dragged away by Barnum... more

Feels impossible
like trying to slice
a tomato with the
Wrong Knife
like trying to heal
with the Wrong Love

-

I am the... more

Catch fire overtaking

I GOT NOTHING      I HAVE / NOTHING     I HAVE

CHLAMYDIA I GOT... more

Ritual for a Lover

Monitor your calorie intake,
shear off your spare tire,
huff over the... more

so of course let it greet you fully in the face of your body
and tackle that which sent it into the dust
and rejoice that a body can chill and still chill back.

I fear being buried alive, but I insist on being buried when I'm dead.

Self-guided tour: Exhibit #9 from the National Museum of Broken Marriages

A medium says to channel the late wife through... more

Whatever: molecules transform / and become part of my arms, my legs—that’s cool.

Glass of Water—

Selves rasp against each other. Mother's little bucket of wisdom tipped over; teacher's sweet girl has... more

They

whoever they are they warn freak snowstorms
in spring & weak apple harvests & everyone mutters
certain doom in... more

In these poems I am using ‘Chelsea Martin’ as a pseudonym for someone who is not Chelsea Martin.

I've been socialized to be alive / the quiet death of women eating salad

i have stopped worrying / about being / a robot / version of me / with unfamiliar eyes / but i have other worries

We lie here together, gold in charred hands, / pulling the ash from each other’s hair.

This is the most difficult sermon, / The one where the disciples / Burn the hamburger buns and / Christ nearly misses his train.

I grow our loneliness in my mouth, feed you— / sweet and bleak— under a halo of buzzing stars.

The snow is beautiful and I want to die. Who could / refuse this softness?

We were little and we wore white we squinted at all that light we were hungry we were given pink candied popcorn

Than the plastic donation kiosks in a mall / shaped like a funnel. You walk up and roll / your change and watch all of it spiral down

I am all the way turned on; turned up. Nerve-hiss-skin. There is a story here, and I am running interference.

It isn't natural / for a thin stem with fruits / to sprout up – / they're heavy, / they're supposed to just hang.

I dream myself into a field that is lime green. There is a branch in my lungs, and I can’t love like I used to. This is a ghost story.

The Gemini

It would be a lie to say I always went to bed with one brother
and woke up with another—that at night he placed... more