Dibs

In Chicago, we use dibs to take
ownership of what we will never own.
Traffic cones, rusted patio chairs, strollers,
a pair of orange Home Depot buckets.
Flanking the concrete.  We

He started as a single Clay Aiken, the one we all knew with the smiling face and aw-shucks demeanor

If this were paint it’d be asymptotic, red.

Too many toasties cut in quarters for Subway. Too many indemnity claims at Allstate.

If you’re wanting to write a poem that will appeal to the largest possible amount of people, you really can’t go wrong writing a poem about water.

believing in nothing
listening to jazz
cooking purple sprouting
rituals evoking
somelike
the aspirations
of the expectations
of a certain

please alert The

Paris Review that this wrenching November

is truly the cruelest month of all.

the drugs didn’t wear off,
the guy she wants to get in bed
                                doesn’t really care.

when she was 6 she’d never touch cigarettes,
                                but drugs made her slip

washing the wound
in beer and poetry

Yellow 1 & 2

I will no longer keep you; I will remember you yellow

you have a beautiful yellow
ache, a scarf made of heavy eyelashes.
I keep you tucked in my backpack among
other

There is not one song
in my YouTube 
favorites 
sad enough
to endure this night
wearing my khaki
work pants 
with a small kitty
crawling on my lap

The internet is

the cat and i are watching HBO pretending time passes much faster than it does like how this guy has been in prison for 52 days but it's only been 11 minutes

i can't look at people on tv

For three days, I drive the city in search of PetCo. Day one, I tell myself that PetCo will be easy
to find. I don't find PetCo. Day two, I use the GPS, but despite reading the

We turned off the game and drove to the mountains, a dead dog in the backseat

One day I came across an inverted map of the Western Hemisphere. Cape Horn was in Alaska's usual position. I felt very disturbed, like air was flooding into the space above North America and

love becoming, like an apple,
this requires time, starred
blossom, then summer, the attention
of bees, grown men
bow their heads, concentrating
on the national anthem
in stadiums

You've told me you feel like a bat.

What you don't mean is your wings.
Or the development of a reflex that draws your ears toward small sounds.

What you do mean is that you're

brick

once in 2011

someone at a party

offered me rum

mixed with cough medicine

from a 1 liter plastic bottle of generic orange soda

i thought

this will make

The computers will run an error the size of oceans howling crazy for the pale moon & will hurtle through our bodies to get there. My brother says the lights across the river will burn out. 

[practice breathing, talk to snakes, how to suck venom from a wound]

     -february 3, 2012: “I’m getting better at branching out”

Whose hometown are we in in the dream? :: Do you hold my hand or do you disembowel me? Whose side are you on, anyway? :: My confession on this Sunday morning is: we are all human.

I’ve seen men punch holes in walls. They lead nowhere – I’ve looked, I tried to escape. I’ve seen what happens afterward too.

another kind of crime scene
walking to the post office with A

Let’s go back to the twin indigo suns/ in our eyes. To shooting holes/ through the walls of our skin, one/ metal kiss at a time...