You need to know
the world used to be softer.
This new color sharpens & blinds.

When it arrived,
people crashed their cars,
stumbled hands over retinas & then
over ledges,

Amoral Impurity

Picking at ingrown
pubes on the porch swing
in the sun on the first
summery day of May 
and the dogs reach up to lick
my cooch. This is not 
the first time today I’ve

I vomit discretion, magic tricks, a glass ashtray. I take a break
from vomiting & light a bottle rocket.

I crave the lack of my thousand siblings...

I am lonely and just learning how to say I'm lonely...

When he wasn't looking / I snuck / a spoonful...

"My Favorite Hat," "Blue Hawaii Hat," and "Rust is a Color, the Tech Sergeant Told Me"

"Review of the Eiffel Tower," "Something to Worry About," and "Misery Is a Little Gray Ceramic Pig"

Before my grandmother had a habit of running wild with the rabbits...

In the dark room, the computer screen...

I should tell you I used to be in an imaginary band...

I mistook a plastic bag...

"American Royals" and "Jenny"

to Mrs. Burrell

When Ms. Griffin was fired, my mother said 
it was because she was too gay, too flamboyant 
for our small charter school. I mourned her 
ombre dreadlocks and her laugh that swept

Nights shipwrecked / in nameless wanting

The city a floating glass 
garden / to be lost in

Banished from the blinked-out streets / we put 
our dollar-store faith / in the claw machine

wager

Morning smells like horseradish,
dogshit. The squat toilet in my uncle’s house:
too cramped to hold

a breathing thing. My cousin, barely older
than three, calls me “姐姐, 姐姐,” as she

Case VIII

Mlle X, a fifteen-year-old girl, spent several months, during the winter of 1883, undergoing hydrotherapy at Longchamps

Exchanging one anya-nyelv, mother-tongue, for another is like 
nibbling salted peanuts at the sticky bar top,
unplanned but eventual for a bilingual migrant. 

The other mother-
nyelv tongue is

Because of its hardiness and tendency to escape cultivation, these non-native wisterias are considered invasive species in many parts of the United States, especially the Southeast, due to their

When my mother built me
again, she did not wait for sobs

to pass. She left clasps undone
then wept in her bedroom.

I tried to reach for the gown
but my fingers mumbled back hair

into metal

What's It Like?

           We have made unspeakable mean indescribable:
           it really means nasty.
                                   -Paul Fussell

You don’t mean nasty. You mean

the man who touches you also touches
the other women of the city, this special
man who you chose to be your first man
even after you’ve met so many men who
wanted to know you as a woman

I will shake your hand now. Later maybe we will have drinks. 

every movie ever has big hard cocks. ass. tits. sorry, I meant porn. sometimes when I travel I listen to the radio. the songs make me think of you and I think of the shapes your mouth makes and I

One Night We Drove Through Yellowstone

I dreamt of a white bear last night,

like the ones in the rainforests

of Alaska. Landlocked, we dreamt

of whispering to them, shaking off

one