“You’re damned if you do and damned if you won’t”

The ferry man asked, Where is its mom? I am his mother!

I am a hoarder trying to salvage pieces.

I put on underpants and pants and socks and shirts in the same sequence every day

When he sees me seeing him, he starts to cry.

Do you think

you’ll be around for dinner tonight?

Susan’s making shepherd’s pie.

In theory, Hell in winter must be great.

a glass/ bottle containing/ the letter I/ wrote: it starts/ with the birthday/ of your first/ born

I’d’ve led him by the wrist. Still but blinding four pm/ back home blazed against the glass.

II. 
A girl and a girl are in love or planning to be.

Under haze of junior-prom fog machines,
       my cells pulsed with
              non-senescence

Your hand had never fully formed, a shadow made of lint & oil. Decades pass, divination is still predicated on how long a candle lasts, how long tea sits in a cup. Coffee? I never touch the stuff.

here were girls who sank/ a thousand leagues beneath his hips/ and never bobbed back for air. I came ashore/ in a body of my own, crooked gate/ and piano fingers

A sky
like an enormous
Friedrich Nietzsche-looking
manhole cover
tries to explain your mind
to you.

i challenge my body/ wearing all white/ i lay down/ only to need to sit up/ i lay down i wish i was/ my own alarm

Tonight a boy goes to a field where he knows a horse has died.

I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.

I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,

you have so many hills.

April

A cycle with seven edges
equals my dream of bicycle spokes
jutting towards the center
of an ice cream bowl. Don’t tell me
the seconds yellow took to elevate
to red isn’t

You were dead: tiny birds of glass littered the road like jeweled confetti for a New Year’s bash.

Or more specifically its monster, long tail whisper in our swimming pool: in a valley girl’s mind. 

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.