I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.

We walk to the edge of the continent / and there in the sand I turn to her and say, / look,
this is where I buried myself 

 Most nights we stayed behind, Tweety Bird / pajama shirts stretched over our knees, waist-length hair soaking / our backs as we sat on the floor and thumbed glossy 10mm prints.

It’s winter and again
my knees are beginning

to ache. My wants

I’m going out
to snag a man. 

my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.

the night of the attack

mother did you hear them
they had tongues like lightning
and forked through the forest
shooting the... more

Is there ever a time to think of poetry? Of poets? Of the rivers of the delta? 

Subtraction, division,

rabbit bones, rabbit lives

sometimes i wake up in empty fields, waiting for the aliens to take me. they haven’t yet,  but any day now, i’m sure.

I am David Attenborough. / I fear no mountain. / I fear no crane. / I fear no plastic bag.

And somehow I’m supposed to get dressed in the morning / when most days arrive like a gold chain tangled in black chest hair.

 Please, I need those thick markers from the craft store, you know, the ones that color far away from each other; you turn the corner into golden golden golden any night

You will etch your name in the most lunar dust. This world / may be large enough for none of us, saddest darling.

 It’s simple, really. / You, like the other yous / are gone,            returned to the God of metals.

After being hospitalized in 1968 / for an aortic aneurysm, Rothko’s doctor / prescribed that he only paint and draw / on mediums less than three feet tall.

And what is essential for me to believe is that / the plants themselves were changed by Joan, / that bathing with her in the light and fragrance

spirits in the trees / hush love hush love / go’on fly home

 how you came with shadows, / but not darkness, like the other person I love, / the type of darkness that lays like a quilt.

It’s bronzy August and I need this to be all over. / Most of my poems are shaped like crows, / so what’s eating you?

A man spills a red solo cup down my shirt like hands. Hands bury in my skin. The speakers bury in my skin. I have never felt farther from the sky, or from my own spit.

The pinwheels of my mourning, having moved to a windless town.

Rarely do I think of death while gnawing the bottom of a vanilla cone.

 i’ve just noticed the harvest / of my hands the last few months, / its loyal glean, the soft shake / to settle my ripe diligence.

every great sadness has occurred because someone / decided fate with their bare hands.

My Left Arm

I was a fruit cake meat loaf of influences –
my name was Sloppy Joe,
I was canned pineapple slices
left out in... more