The Great Swedish Store

“You are cursed,” my Dida said, solidifying the bells of mortality that were ringing.
“Ki?” I responded, my eyes wide with fear and panic.
“There is a beauty mark here inside you. It means you are cursed with sexiness.”

i want to be made into french fries

The truth was I knew exactly what was happening, how the possibility of power had clouded my judgment. In bed at night, I thought about putting a stop to all of it and just playing the season out, but I couldn’t shake my contempt for Parker. It wasn’t about baseball anymore, not in the slightest. It had taken just a few days for me to turn the war of aesthetics into a full-fledged revolution.

Many dust the dream, wait the time.
How important is motion?

getting a haircut in the year’s first month will cause the death
of an uncle eating fish will bring your family abundance
八 meaning eight sounds the same as 發 meaning wealth
& also hair eight

from
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO X

Prayer is what you do when you don’t know whether your animal will live through the night. Pink like Pepto-Bismol staining a goat’s chin. Everything lives and

how to wear a crop top to office depot

trying not to think of you

when i connect with someone

i start to fear rejection

because that’s what

i’m used to

not being famous

feels

I made eye contact, made the purchase, stored it between other magazines on my bookshelf.

1.

I found a copy of Spirit of Elijah by Wilson McKinley on the record shelf of the Goodwill in Bellingham, Washington. Like many of the thrift store records I own, I bought it because it looked

Because there’s a god for the water on your skin
when you’ve come from the lake. One for the absence
of flowers in a vase, for every pump and filter organ inside my dog

One god isn’t enough to

“YOU IDIOT!” I scream, but only in my head. For 25 years now I haven’t been able to speak my mind, especially not to a stranger. Enrolling in Glenda’s Eagle Training course is supposed to help, but for now I’m still a grounded hatchling teetering my way through week three of the seven-week program.

Heavy Metal Love Song

Street drafts off the two-tone carpet in my underworld            

Air so much wetter than the memory of it        sharpness of weather
spoiling for more life

Two buses

No Vision

Two teenagers set my state on fire
with a bottle rocket. We flee
between coasts like politics.
I work three jobs so I can buy
new brakes & a tattoo of a heart
shooting lightning.

“And there’s got to be some guidelines for this.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Lionel said. “So what are they? You just let me know and I’ll follow them. By God, I will.”
I didn’t have much for him. I sputtered some nonsense about my side of the refrigerator and if he saw Doritos in the pantry, especially the Cool Ranch kind in the blue bag, he should just assume that they were mine. But that was pretty much it.

There’s an elderly couple camped out in the parking lot of an abandoned Bennigan’s.

Full-sized, luxury RV, Weber grill, folding chairs, red Coleman cooler.

These folks have options, and yet they

On the street, the music thundered from an unseen source, day and night – but it was, oddly, only audible from the sidewalk. Once ensconced inside our house, we forgot about it, as we neglected so many external things during medical school.

BEFORE LIFT OFF

Before the plane’s wheels begin spooling air
in an act of contrition 

as if to say                   this place, it’s fine,
                                    but the next—you

These days writers are obsessed with themselves and once upon a time they were exactly the same way, obsessed with themselves. Once upon a time, there was a man who worked at the Strand and his name

When my partner finds a stone she likes, she shares its burden with me. She never seems to have a place to keep them.

You notice you’re being followed. Headlights in the rearview mirror—though they all look the same, these seem somehow familiar, like a pair of eyes you’ve seen in a dream.

A spoonful of vanilla ice cream crosses oceans of history. Hold that dollop on the back of your tongue.  Consider.

Today, nothing could be whiter than vanilla ice cream.  Vanilla means white.  It

reasons why my father sent me a picture of a dead coyote

to start a conversation

to assuage my worries

to prove he knows my brand

to remind me of my mortality

to remind me of his

to

Asynchronous
Or,
Damn You, Tinder
In Which
A Mobile Dating App Provides Reminding that
We Are All of Us the Playthings of Chance

Waiting in line at the DMV that squats at the center of