As a girl I played with dolls, sang
soprano, wore sparkly eyeshadow from
Claire’s. It never felt good to be called sir.

The man who bought Hitler’s bed did not have nightmares as a child. 

You were the hands

Woke up alone today in my own bed
after a solid sleep for the first time

in over three weeks, feeling strange there,
almost... more

I carve horses out of watermelon. I swallow / fish eyes like gum drops. I pray under / neon chandeliers, string chrysanthemum / in my hair. 

i think i was an onion in a former life / i think you chopped me / lord how high were we last night

Remember the word “party line”? It meant that everyone in your town who wanted to could hear exactly what you were saying. How fucked up is that? Wasn’t that great?

Remember when every stray dog was a love story and the snow that night cleared the crust that had gummed my eyes shut? No, me neither, but fuck it. Let’s get lit one last time. 

O, I don’t get wet for / the Hot Dads of US Weekly or the dad / bods of Star, but give me Frank Sinatra’s / voice crooning in a Hong Kong cab, and I’m hooked

 I wish I had that glorified high school / experience— where some boys / are chugging expired strawberry liqueur / and everyone, I mean everyone, / is sprawling on the grasscarpet

When I exhaust all other forms of exploration, / this landscape will deny me at the border; / & I will turn my gaze toward a darkening / sky filled with stars I no longer recognize.

Sometimes I say novels ruined me in the way they ruin all young bookish girls, slowly and tenderly rotting out the light and making room for the sweet dark.

On Wednesday, I find my teeth / have sharpened over the night / It’s a strange thing to get used / to

Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.

All the waffles in Texas / are shaped like Texas. All / the waffles in Ohio / are shaped like waffles.

Above me, all the alien lovers are asleep, stuck together beneath their foreign moons.

It means nothing now but it meant enough then, enough to change a life, to alter the smooth rhythmic turning of the world. 

He doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t want any.

That’s the only way Mays can pitch, 

because he doesn’t play the game 

of fraternity formed on summer ballfields. 

Whenever I
fly I search
for the baseball
diamonds.

Me at my most beautiful. Me locked in. Me sacrifice stance.

He could say from experience

that Babe Ruth was an asshole,

but he never said it on the field.

How fucking weird is the knuckle ball?

That was the year Dave Kingman’s pop fly never came down at the Metrodome
Nineteen players were ejected... more

Before the nasty glances, which I sense to be for me, I shake my downcast head, grin in disappointment, and mutter “Damn.”

While waiting in my car outside your house I counted thirteen wrinkled ticket stubs I’d tucked inside the glovebox after games
to serve as some reminder of the season so far.