It is something like a nuisance that you exist. But I have headphones to help ignore

Y’all’re fine ass. Y’all got dark in the pill-bottle-orange sun

I went to a poetry reading and a guy I’d slept with once read a list of everything he’d done in Los Angeles and I wasn’t on it. 

I imagine her
walking into my bedroom—Drunk

between her legs, the whole world
the same temperature; 

I ask the sun to call me at night on my walk home. Everyday I become a little more scared. I recognize people and cars and it makes me nervous. My mother told me girls are most likely to be

Don't high five me for drinking a 40.
Don't ask me for a Newport.

there are days without. Not quite a gap in whatever they call it, the space-time continuum or circadian rhythms or the tidal pull of every single thing, not quite, but noticeable enough to know what’s not here, that others are not here,

Instead I see embroidery, lace-making or metallurgy, fine filigree of rusting swing set against wood, the vertical birdfeeders foregrounded, but so close my eye misses them at first. I don’t know what to call this world anymore.

I want to call you and sing the Prince song, discuss the proportions of his tiny frame, imagine his tongue together, stay on the phone for hours like we used to. Those days are gone. 

I imagine Temperance Brennan's annual gynecological exam might go something like mine: If you're not finding time to eat, you must not be having a lot of... Are you seeing anyone right now?

I lie night after night
With the only one I hate more than myself

Artisanal meth is amazing

The whitetail flit across the road,
tails raised in greeting or surrender,
a herd—a small stampede—crossing
this rural Iowa highway, emerging
from fields of green, leaping
the cable guard

TRIDENT LISP

When tenderness runs out there is tenderness,
Jonathan says.  We hand-in-handed but days
ago to the hiss of ocean spray, the salutation
and valediction of the sea a frothing

ZAZEN AT THIRTY-SIX

When I was twenty, Emily called me
from her dorm room. She wanted to know
if I believed in God, something about
trading an Iowa village population
three grand for a

I
     
i dedicate this poem
to the first 15 years
of the twenty first century.
it's name is "citrus".
i call it that
because I can't remember
its real name,
or anything else

That was the night Gabby and I drank the bottle of bourbon next to the makolet.
In America, we call them mini-marts, but in Israeli outskirts,
we call them makolets --
until we can’t form the

It's Complicated

I could make a painting brighter
if I used brighter colors
It’s as simple as that

But it’s really not because
I don’t want to use brighter colors

And why I don’t

I have developed the habit
of staring at the hands
of people standing next to me on the train

The Springfield Fire Department Reminds You to Be Prepared for Earthquakes

Even though Vachel Lindsay drank
lye and died in this room we
make out for a few minutes when
the tour guide

Benjamin Charles Dowd

This has nothing to do with what you etch into the trunk
with his only pocket knife or that it will take him hours to axe
the tree down, set it aflame. Or that it was

Make a vision board

Watch Girl, Interrupted

Eat more protein

            SCENE

An ill wind that blows nothing. Autumn eats its leaves. It’s hard enough to understand the sequence of things--the king becomes the queen, the queen becomes the joker,