July yawns. Flashes its grills...

"Faith" and "Arcade-Scented Candle"

It is late, mid-July...

When your father and I found out you were a boy I remembered the time in my early twenties a co-worker at my first restaurant job invited me out for a drink with the crew after our shift. He drove me

soju smooch...

in the poem ava wrote, the one...

"The Hen Who Pecked Her Children to Death" and "I Take My Partner to a Wedding"

I kept my thoughts about Bitchface Becky to myself

 but then Beyoncé did something magical

Orange

It’s a child’s color                        or it should be             tasting like early summer 
before it fades to the broom-sweep coat of the dog days.
But now our nightmares are

Bible | Vers

Top to Bottom | scan my profile | For Christ’s Sake | Sing Jesus’ Name | I gospel & apostle | Book of Vers | My rural bottom’s up | My crop /top | down along the road | a hym(n) in

There’s a song in my figurative head 
that I can’t shake loose. 
When I was a body, 
I did so many things with my hands, 
I can’t count. 
Around here it smells like lightning, 
like plasma.

Portrait of Boy Refusing His Father's Music

The kids talk about Posh Spice. 
They sing Top 40 hits.                Mother drops me off.  

High volume on, the ballads sung by her 
are

All that whimpers isn’t want.

One spring, I pulled
a reed from an oboe.
I planted it by a pond. 
Instantly, it grew 

dense at the water’s edge. 
The wind told lie after lie—

black

Morning gets angry and destroys a city
not New York, too obvious, but suppose
it’s on the coast. Suppose we’re the first to go

I picture Goya’s Colossus and my empathy
runs threadbare. Suppose

                             in response to a student evaluation for a science fiction class, Fall 2018

Student, it’s true—I prefer women
to lentils, to crossfit classes,
to retirement plan

this poem starts on a tuesday in Kansas

a twister settles in. there is a twister dancing 
in the night like a blight on the sky’s eye & 
the people are afraid. someone yells: there is a

Goats and cows’ dreams have little pull yet. Cheese
is still cheese, piston driven milkers likely painful. The future
of sirloin strips it of skin, legs, bones, grown without 

the cortex of

                                                           
                                                           {All I Wanted Was Everything}

You say you know the reason why Archimedes

It Worked Out a Way to Survive

The Venus he gave me ate another daddy
longlegs. They were still wiggling when I
watered it this afternoon. It's a cruel world
he texted me last month but it's

We ate dinner with our heads down masticated silence Mom slathered hot sauce on everything including Dad’s words and the ones he didn’t say lips spraying consonants vowels dribbling down his chin i

FANTASIA FOR FOUR HANDS

Hello. This is my body. 
It makes me terrible. 
Someone opens it regularly.
It is opened regularly. 
I am always the same thing: 
what’s missing.

Make a sentence

after Britney Spears

The camera pans—is this still
Mars? Oops. Gloss-

lip. Oops. Long-lashed eyes
gazing between the scraps.

Guttural purr. Oops I.
Did. It. Again. White girl

Precarious Poem

I’m craigslisting again and this time, 
I’m in Portland hanging plants

next to windows, snaking 
vines around the glass, framing the outside

green in green. In

I was standing in line for a movie and a movie played in my head.
I was standing in line for a movie and the movie I was waiting to see strode through the lobby and out the front door.
I was

Dear Naomi,

Please find enclosed some clippings from the local fishwrapper.  I’ve underlined the juicy parts in blue pencil.  It’s complete kleptocracy down here.  You were right to leave.  I can’t