I could have no path, no idea of what I should be or how I should live. I could skate through neighborhoods, where I wouldn’t find a Mormon church or anyone who knew I had strayed from the path I was raised to follow

My father inhales smoke from a lone Marlboro,
            shadowed against a sun colored like dead autumn leaves.
He gently cradles the barrel of tobacco between his pointer
            &

The funeral is over, Eliza is back at work, and she has eaten dinner at home three times now, once alone, even.

A Queer Translates Rilke

I long to know his self-described “epic head”
with my eyes closed. But for now, his torso
radiates from my screen like a delirious
lighthouse, like it is recharging my

Patience is one virtue that me and Wayne both got in spades.

The king’s first wife went crazy and no longer obeyed him, so he sent her away.

Since You Left I Have Spent My Days Staring Blankly at the Beer Sign in the Bar From the Time it Opens Until Closing Time

Neon

Neoff

Boredom

I walked through the senior hallway, heart beating fast. The boys’ stares burned into my skin as they whispered things to each other.

“Mrs. Bolthuis wants you to help her with something. Ride over there and see what she wants. Homework can wait for once.”

In my head, dating women was a body competition.

Color Study, or Ode to Discomfort

It was never safe for us—
always beneath the eye is blood;
and maybe a ferocious tongue
called

“If you have to say you’re fine, you’re probably not,” the crow replied.

Because let’s face it, boiled tea does not meet my privileged standards for heat. 

Lenore was at the cusp. I’m cusping, Percy, she rasped. Percy was unsure what to do about it. Press forward? Hang back?

I remember being young and small and barefoot on the concrete floor: look closely and see how the cicada shells vibrate as the Texas Hill Country winds sift in.

In jazz, woodshedding refers to the shed you sequester yourself in, as a young musician learning the craft, a private space to develop your own style, away from prying eyes or critical ears.

Married twenty years today, Heather and Vic play that game.

i trapped pete wentz
in a pastoral landscape

It’s the first time I remember feeling that superstrong tween indignation that he’d taken something that was supposed to be just mine.

They walked along the railroad somewhere in Atlanta on a cold and bitter night, the full moon above them like a yellow coin some unforgiving God had tossed far out into the galaxy. In the near

Every car passing by might house a backseat scout

There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.

Were this place to close, or burn, or fall, in an earthquake, down.
Were it to flood or be bulldozed to make way for the gray &
unmusical slab of an apartment building. Were it to be