one night in Manita

after Gertrude Stein

say any of the passersby could stop, supposing / that we eat, supposing the rest of the
table watches / and even if i decided i did want to dance /

Grandma is diligent, committed, but not once does she share any church secrets with me.

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

A tiny Angus resides in the right speaker of our sound system, a miniature Malcolm in the left.

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.

The other thing Belle did
Was burn three holes in my thigh
With her cigarette
Revenge for the chaos I’d caused

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.

Gut reno

Take down to the studs. Dismantle walls, yank up floorboards, rip roof till the black chasm of foundation fills with sun. What could be illuminated. Scrape for bone and craft from it a

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.

When I was small, I was certain he hung the moon. It’s still a possibility—I can, in fact, imagine his immaculate frame climbing a ladder upward—but in twenty years I’ve become less certain about everything, even him.

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.

The tapering light in that dingy parlour. The cracking leather on the chair. My splintered face in the mirror.

“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 do not know why I am unbuttoning my shirt in the middle of the crowded sidewalk. How quickly memories shelve into one another, like shale reassembling itself. On the other side of the street, two

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.