On Penguins in Brooklyn

the protagonist feels like
she’s never leaving,
stuck on a moving walkway
in the middle of cincinnati
international airport
in kentucky,
headphones dangling,
she

Two months in, we began to confide our secrets to each other. Her early brush with benzos. My peer-pressure-prone passivity.

Equivalence

How heartbreaking to find irises tilting
to full bloom in one direction
as if waiting for someone to come
down their path are one symptom
of light’s partiality. A heart

To our right, I feel the cool breath of a gaping canyon. It beckons, invisible behind the wall of fog, its voice the skid of tires on gravel.

montreal

baked brick, dark bread,
breath sinking into a hot, grey bath when
caught in smoke between compartments
on the metro. pink lights from
the townhouse on rue de rushbrooke
blinking away

Once the coffee cooled I took a sip and said, Not bad for McDonald's coffee.

And he said, It really is a good cup of coffee. Wherever you go, you can always depend on McDonald's for a good cup of coffee.

And I thought, McDonald's coffee is trash.

September Dream

An eternity, for the Asphodel, is a brief few
months. It’s been a decade, as the crow flies,

ten days on Venus, ten Venus days,
each, longer than a year.

When I’m without

I get too drunk on a Tuesday night and tell him I want to marry him. We’ve known each other for six years.

I’ve become a puddle on the floor everyone dances around, stares at, hoping to see something.

And if memoirs allow us to relive the past, novels give us a chance to change it.

I WANT TO THANK YOU

for unbottling my aged Mandarin with each 晚安 / for cooking me these sardines / strewn on a
beach of rice, their eyes still intact / I want to thank you / for carrying that

You roamed in like a chuckling bear into my house of beakers, graduated cylinders, round bottom flasks, you asked to borrow an Erlenmeyer, here you go, I said, thought you were just a clumsy animal, afraid you'd break something of mine, pushed you out of the lab and you came back bearing M&M's in a petri dish, half of them a mess of Blue No. 2

I pledged to him two things: one, that I would hex the ones that hurt him, and two, that I would write him poetry.

I’ll Always Make Love to the Mississippi.

We bruised
my knees on the bluff.

I’ve disappeared into the current
of loving nothing
but tainted water lapping against rotten fish
against a rocky

When They Let Them Bleed: Ten Years After

It took me a long time to write “When They Let Them Bleed” – both in the practical sense, in that I recall writing it in very short bursts because it was

They whispered wow wow wow wow in wind that might've just toppled them over; they whooped; they swapped interlocked arms for tightly-squeezed hands and back again.

Stuffed cracks in ground with paper towels

I used to chew on blocks of wood
crying that the dentist has gone away from town.
*
My mouth would open wide
for sparkling birds and insects to enter

Whimsy is not as prominently scarred as she imagines herself to be, but this obsession with her face leads her to sabotage her relationships because her insecurity is so destructive.

“Timothée Chalamet and Lily-Rose Depp Make Out, Eat Fried Chicken”

They are busy galocher-ing on 2nd Avenue
I am on the sidewalk looking at the sky

They are stopping to wipe their mouths
it

i felt you were floating now with them, in a bubble in space, the bubble has a name, ecstasy, keta, speed, coke, that’s the name of the bubble.

For the better part of every year I try like heck to be a better person. Nicer. More caring. This year I’ve taken up breathing. I breathe in and I breathe out each day. Last year I learned to put less

Rome was good. Sat ninety in the summers. Leaned on his off speed when the weather got cold. Postseason, most of the district had seen him by then, we took advantage of teams whose scouts said he was

I played left field for the Tularosa Middle School Tarantulas girl’s team. I was long and brittle, like a cactus spine. Or a splinter. And I was afraid of the baseball. I batted .083 that summer and

I pick up Henry after work and we drive 65 miles to the first game of Colin’s fall AAU league. It costs enough, but college is looming and some short-term discomfort for the chance at a scholarship is

i'm in love with the thousand yard stare
deeply towards the worn fold
of the catcher's glove