I know god is real because persimmons exist.

He paints using the ashes of the towers in his watercolors.

i mean, i was black before too.

The air before me
is the flavor of
an oat cake popsicle.
Or a shoe box. 
Or the water sports
I’m not doing. 
So I sign for
a prescription
while all the world
is water sporting
in

Fifty cents for tickets in the bleachers—then. Fifty cents a railroad car to Pittsburgh.
A “marvel” they’d called it. Three tiers of steel, the façade terracotta, the balls off
the deck, bouncing.

It was a slow curve—a big bender,
spinning against the trajectory
of the ball. It hung

Letterman wore khakis and the camera angled up his crotch. I watched every night or set my VCR to record on the rare occasion I left my apartment.

I ended up in right field, ponytail eschew, cap falling to the bridge of my nose, shadowing my freckled cheeks.

I don’t think it made a sound.

Feels impossible
like trying to slice
a tomato with the
Wrong Knife
like trying to heal
with the Wrong Love

-

I am the evening flower
bloom at night
you are crows feet
crocodile eyes
a

Catch fire overtaking

I GOT NOTHING      I HAVE / NOTHING     I HAVE

CHLAMYDIA I GOT FROM

WHAT     YOU / THINK I HAVE

EVERYTHING AND THIS I DON’T

HAVE / NOTHING      I GOT I

GOT I

so of course let it greet you fully in the face of your body
and tackle that which sent it into the dust
and rejoice that a body can chill and still chill back.

I fear being buried alive, but I insist on being buried when I'm dead.

Self-guided tour: Exhibit #9 from the National Museum of Broken Marriages

A medium says to channel the late wife through beloved objects. I press my ear to a mug, a journal, my husband’s chest.

Whatever: molecules transform / and become part of my arms, my legs—that’s cool.

Glass of Water—

Selves rasp against each other. Mother's little bucket of wisdom tipped over; teacher's sweet girl has curdled. Mere glimpse of the calm hand of an honest femme could heal—cool

They

whoever they are they warn freak snowstorms
in spring & weak apple harvests & everyone mutters
certain doom in small talk & watches the news cycle
for the deaths of their

In these poems I am using ‘Chelsea Martin’ as a pseudonym for someone who is not Chelsea Martin.

I've been socialized to be alive / the quiet death of women eating salad

i have stopped worrying / about being / a robot / version of me / with unfamiliar eyes / but i have other worries

We lie here together, gold in charred hands, / pulling the ash from each other’s hair.

This is the most difficult sermon, / The one where the disciples / Burn the hamburger buns and / Christ nearly misses his train.

I grow our loneliness in my mouth, feed you— / sweet and bleak— under a halo of buzzing stars.

The snow is beautiful and I want to die. Who could / refuse this softness?

Than the plastic donation kiosks in a mall / shaped like a funnel. You walk up and roll / your change and watch all of it spiral down