reasons why my father sent me a picture of a dead coyote

to start a conversation

to assuage my worries

to prove he knows my brand

to remind me of my mortality

to remind me of his

to

Please Hold

I’m patiently unraveling
on the phone while the automated service
explains overdraft and accrue
and rollover – I’m not talking to anyone
but I’m pleading nonetheless.
       I’m

First Week of April, Los Angeles
(as transcribed from the iCalendar “what really happened”)

1
got crab and salmon sushirritos with the ex and put on planet earth 2 right at the moment sir david

10,000 years from now

two men will be
digging
in the ground
and they’ll find
a frisbee
buried deep below the surface.

one man will look it over,
puzzled,
and turn to the other man
and

to gain followers I use my body then / I lose them with my poems

while i / in half-lotus / pluck stubble from / my belly

i only do the poet voice / when i'm hungover

Rain drags its cage / through the neighborhood. You / see nothing but // trenches. Rusty shovels, / the alien rocks sprayed / like genitals. 

For weeks after, I watched California burn / out my window & on the evening news & the ash // in my cheeks became the only way/ to pronounce home.

My dog keeps biting me when he’s scared / and, like anyone, is always scared.

With the bobby pin I’ve kept beneath my tongue all morning, / my fingers spring the lock to my parent’s bedroom // where mom’s cherry lipstick glows beneath a seashell lamp. 

New Jersey as land of claws & fangs & deep fields of grass that stumble onto the side of the highway // New Jersey as fields of soft dirty ice // New Jersey as blondhairblueeyes slapping you in the face at lunch in the cafeteria in front of all your friends

I’ve mooned away my marriage, / grounded it, ripped the fuselage / in two, or is the better metaphor
to say I heard the countdown go / from ten to zero and didn’t even / try to stop my wife from breaking / the gravity of disaster planet me?

Field Notes in Haiku

I hear a giant
lives in a stardew valley
I follow the signs:

a knot of sparrows
outlines the shape of a nose—
cold autumn rainfall

the field of yarrow
turned

you know me like an artifact

1

[meimei’s a meatness sis slug of blood boat the body tiger the teeth selfie tongue selfie chintilt selfie lilt her lily pucker her puss pin her skin back tap her mouth flap saps herself a shelf

chew on that witya brainteeth!

mother moon stop calling me

Dogwood 

I knew the blossoms. I caught 
them all. My mother
won’t let me forget this.  
But really, what’s so bad about 
marking this way?  
The tree saying she was this high
the summer she

 between what is love and what is fixation of 

I live my life by white lies.
And poetry is white lies.
Second language is white lies too.
As well as the first.
But language is the only way 
to hide love.
White, black, transparent,
or

I engrave myself into the floor

what a creature I would make of myself if I were able
to be known to be close to anything to be grounded

as always, my resolution

is to get a Guns N’ Roses tattoo

//
i wish i
                    can fly
                    was in dixie
                    could quit
                    was on vacation
                    was taller