I’m thankful for the throwaways. Like the time the Bears lost in extra innings. Randy Bass, pre-Hanshin Tigers Randy Bass, had committed an error on a routine toss to the pitcher at first. It was

Then something funny happened / after months of imprisonment, / handled like/ animals, less than/ animals, / they started playing baseball.

Signals

When dead whales wash up on your shores,
it's not your insult to heaven, nor your fifteen-

        foot song carried

                       by high tide into flushing

That night in April. / That other night in April. 

soliciting chimps / in the shit cage

Dear Editor,         or         Owl

Attached are poems in which I spin my head three hundred sixty degrees attempting to stare at myself. Attached are poems in which I attempt to eat myself

& spread / my arms out / like a giant squid

I want to be a zygote again. / I want to be a dumb plant.

When clearly it could be a mommy or even a child for that matter.

My god, I remember how badly I wanted her to see.

How To Be an Acclaimed Poet in America

I never saw them but I knew people shot our outhouses.

I have watched too much reality TV about Kimye and teen mothers. This is why I cannot explain April like a normal person.

you wore a shirt with balloons on it, drank whiskey, stood in front of a mirror, had violent ideation

She says she had a dream about bodies packed together, blue & bruised & left to bleed. 

if I could re-wire myself I would
start again a blank heart with no pictures

i bought an essay with someone else’s money when i was 23
just to feel what it was like to steal words
it was the sickest i’ve ever been

The moon is small and perfectly cut.
Blinking between trees like the cursor
you used on your middle school blog.

Miracles come more seldom now.
It’s satellite interference.

In the far-flung depths of the future, historians
will look back to this day and say, "This
is where it all went wrong."

There’s something about a horse that floats.
Watch her neck hover over the half-door
of a stall, or her sunlit backside rise

my brain is on fire
so i can tell by the colors
that winter is coming

Benjamin Franklin’s wife rubbed his paper fingers all over her body, saying, "I’ve got you now, Sweet Baby, I’ve got you now.” 

when i was born, you bought a hill—
a great mound of clay and bone
and you named that mountain after us.

once I dated a girl w/"good is dead"
tattooed across her chest she turned out to be right
but not the way she wanted to be