Death in the Family

my car scraped you and your bike alongside the highway,

in the grade below me over at the public high school
edged off the median at just the wrong second I

Mathematics IIIIIIIIIII

A miracle trapped in a fur coat. A fur coat trapped in its original body.

Mathematically speaking, the body is made up of four essential parts: the arms, the ideas,

Polyphase Signals

I sit in the morning garden
slick
from last night’s rain

ants run in circles
across
the iron table   except

for one   perched on the
lip
of my Mother’s

I dream of seeing your beautiful face somewhere other than in the familiar expressions captured in photographs on the internet

Essay On The Theory of Motion

You remember reading a poem once about a boy driving his grandmother to the library across town. Someone said that the car is a perfect device for giving a poem

The Doctor’s Office

is windowless. He asks me to undress—You can wear this. He places a large white bird wing in my lap. It’s winter. I’m holding gloves. Then he’s back and I’m lying on the

POSTCARD

It is just beautiful –
the waves look like nothing

and the stars

choke on the air.

VARIOUS DISTANCES

I still can see you,
on the steps without
a

tracy

what if i opened my mouth and a swarm of bees just, you know. the weather said it might rain, and i was like, 'okay.' this is thinking about tracy. that's like, a city somewhere, in the

I Wrote a Eulogy for What We Used to Be

I sank into
what seemed like an endless abyss
of blue distraught and infinite sadness;
I realized I had no way of feeling like I'd be loved by you

Icon

you have a room in your apartment just for painting pictures.

you sleep on the floor next to your computer and iPhone. the iPhone is almost in your mouth.
it smells like old

HOMILY

In a world this red & watery, I have no choice but to be a wild animal waiting to be killed.  These laddered roses stacked atop my chest, all these decisions filled with blood.  My

My friend’s friend dated Mario Lopez in college

There you go, in the papers again. Your mouth a hawk dive; your fists up and double-siloed. While you play overcast, we tend to the beetle

Big Boogie, Big Boogie, after watching the way you move through the years
I bet you could dance across water and sometimes I hold my breath
when I see you twirling in the post, all 280 of you,

Discourse is a pretty forceful process, perhaps the most forceful of the superstructural processes available.
Everybody wants to be petted and nobody seems to blame me for his unusual

[Idea for a picture]

A painter is painting a portrait with an observer beside him. Inside the portrait is a naked woman trying to cover herself with her arms. It may be a Portrait of Venus, or

It’s time to stop relying on sunsets to help move us away from tonight and into tomorrow.

A request to the new tenant

Walls bare but for paint & hooks, floors bare but for stains & nails,
we leave insides as we find them; yet of neighbors &

Portrait of Toothless Girl and Dead Hare
After Claudia Cortese and Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”

Dear Christina,

Ma shot Ell in the chest on Sunday. He got a toothache right after,

My Mother Reads From Her Dream Journal

I.

We—you, me, and your sisters—are in a room the size of a broom closet and you say to me What do I do with this jellyfish? and I don’t understand

GIRL POWER

i’ve slept with someone who had a girlfriend
somewhere else i’ve slept with someone who
told me they loved their ex-girlfriend immediately
after sleeping together i’ve slept

February break

Turkish Regis Philbin traveled
to Turkey to visit his
95-year-old mother who is close to death.
So I took February off.

Close to death.  Like, close to schools
and

Boyish Pursuits

The ocean is a junkyard of sheet metal
with headlight eyes and grillwork teeth,
wave after rusted wave dragging hood
emblems and hubcaps to and from the beach
like so

We tell each other the names / of our dead. The cities we live in // are gnawing then burying / the cadavers of opulent dreams.

At my father's funeral
I thought I was in heaven because that's where I was told he was.

Liking the world is not easy, though sometimes it is / a large wave that carries you.