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

if I were an Amish girl,
I would leave
for Rumspringa...

Glissade, pas de bourrée. I stole a bottle of Cointreau from mother’s liquor cabinet

In the dream you are not a lamb on fire.

Suddenly I want to be the one to leave a party.
Maybe life imitates art after all.

Today
I was at McDonald’s
and there was this chunky,
high school-aged kid...

I know the scars of my grandfather do you. I know the guns in my pelvis do you...

later, an iguana slinked up the steps in a macho, prehistoric way...

You must imagine god as syrupy mist.

You imagine you’re a tipping point wrapped in a synthetic summer dress.

None of us have those cats who go
viral meowing Springsteen songs...