For weeks I thought only of this We are a body We will come undone A table of snow and a table of sorrow A tea that smells of a house burned down

I consider the narrow chain of cars pulled through city parks like kite-string.  In linguistics, mora is a single unit of syllabic weight.  I consider yelling at the yellow cab to add more syllabic weight to my overall point.

Where Everywhere Snow, There Grass

There was a patch of grass. There was snow
around the patch of grass. There was me.
I am not about the snow; the snow is not about
me. Although

Thing Being

               Écriture feminine

I was told on a train I was after

delicate—or something to do

with feathers. I heard bird, bird

bird. I heard the word

In first grade

we had to make
a little booklet
about our dads.

You take a sheet
of paper, fold it
fold it again

and then draw
a picture
on every page.

Well, on the

will become

the morning your boots are filled with so much gravity that it is impossible to walk up or fall down a hill, will be the morning before violence. on this morning, the edge of

The gouges / in the floor will become your scars, even as you erase / the life you had together. The floor is your map.

Parricide

Finally they took over the city of my father,
filled it with mosquitoes and bush fog, threw him
in a river of flamingo feces. His snide asides
fell on foreign ears, for

Sound for Fishes

Swim with a rock clutched between your teeth, apple-like. Have a friend do the same. Bang your rock against his rock. It will look like bad CPR. Sound is loudest

Anything worth saying can be rendered / as an aphorism, might itself be an aphorism, / just so you know     My phrase of the moment / is radiant action...

George Strait’s in this poem now, he’s meddling
with everything.  He’s reading words
with the wrong inflections, making me older
than I know how to be. He wants Texas in here;
[defend

Remember being mammalian in the friar patch?

Remember your best reserve for slattern hells?

Remember being mammalian?

This gizmo stuck in my fuss like a picnic,

I turned my head so fast / I mistook the moon / for a firework / and then I wanted // to bark too...

& I am in this seat / doing the yeoman’s work / of relocating, of settling / for Florida’s budburst protocol // when I’d rather be on my back / in Arkansas or Illinois, Alabama...

To brood in a cool bath, / imagined all virginal as when a child, // tangle of one single hair calligraphic against hip...

All the money is wet & gummy / underneath the brightest pink trees. / They fade to breast cancer color when it rains.

Where Bullet Breaks

Come–
See where Bullet broke
Brother, see where I break
where we split into before
and after. We fracture                                          at the root,

Look at me falling in love with fallible bodies.
Look at me performing emotional labor...

A Preamble to an Explanation of You

It was like I worked in a Popsicle factory
but had never tasted the color red.
I walked the dry tongue of the road
as crickets scritched

Sticky Fingers

Mick Jagger I want you to pry the top off this maple syrup for me while I flip the pancakes—I didn’t wipe it down before I closed it last & now I fear it’s sealed

poem in the morning

this farmer's tan is not going to go away
all by itself
but what can i do about it?
go to the beach?
take my shirt off at work?
that would not be very

After a Late Night Outcall (Creepy Enough to Care)

my feet are so warm
I shouldn't have worn
my felt boots
I didn't mean to be drunk
I'm a dull woman
these days
it's just
I

 to the right of my heart a button °
if you see the button press deeply into me

I am shining brilliantly on my way down the stairs

in 1984 I thought everything existed as light

in

again andy is crying.
all the days he is crying.

An Interview #1

Vibe Magazine: Why haven’t you shot yourself in the head?

Aaliyah: My mother sits in her padded recliner, stares through a row of Law & Order DVDs and thinks, "I