[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.

Before, the possums’ noise had been an angry hissing, but now their voices were becoming sweet, even musical, the world of them trilling and humming into their endless, private night.

In the end, there are five bear cubs underneath your porch. You name them after U.S. Presidents. Taft dies of starvation.

I wake up in a wheelchair. I wake up on display. 

It is April 2^nd, 2014. I tell me I told us. I’m happier. The fourth sentence is treating it like home. Our cats are brothers with dichromatic eyes. 

I remember Marc said, you’re wet just because of the humidity.

Joni says, “Time moves so fast these days.”

                  Joni is somewhere between three and four times my age and I am twenty-two.

Located at Oak Park Rd. and Forest Preserve Rd. in Chicago,
you must park about a mile away and make the trip to the en-
trance on foot. 

hell you know it’s only a question of dainty morsels
you can eat dog food probably and survive

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.