Theater of Inheritance

Wrong to say I accept the rough
face of my family. Your father,

so young-looking, your mother
even more. I grew older than boys

around me because I was

Canada Goose — the age-old adage of 
whether or not a ton of bricks or a ton 

of feathers is heavier & the fact that it’s
always the feathers because you have to live 

with the guilt on

On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion 
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats, 

glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its 
rickety

adjective /

fuck yes

We keep what’s between us a secret. 
I’m supposed to be at your house

and you’re supposed to be at mine,
but, really, we lie in the center of the wheat 

where no one can find us, make

i came to America too young
to be foreign, so all my dreams 
are American and contemporary,
present and blinding as morning-hunger:
a fat gull scavenges for loose plastic bags 
and their

is the egg yolk, broken when it was meant to be fried, 
the sobbing of a child who’s just found 
that their favorite character does not survive, 

the scraped knee, the store out of cigarettes

                                                 ⁠–⁠After José Olivarez 

When Carly’s body
isn’t a body but ash
they wish to be poured
into Lake Washington
below a sun becoming half
a sun,

I took the test. 
Persistent rash? 
A cough? A rumor. 
A fungus 

from that polluted 
Ipanema beach. 
I smiled when I heard, 
took a drag, bent 

my wrist, palm up. Juana 
Delledonne.

I'm up here along the photograph and its shore, calling to you. Dive off your custom watercraft and swim to the beach. No one of us standing here blames you for being seduced by the once constant tingle of skin we've followed all our lives.

TIP TOP VACATION PERFORMANCE

Two women velcroed a husky, mesh tank top
in order to separate the men from the boys.
Then, 20 aisles apart, mimed the crucifixion.
Words I’m akin to grasp start in

"Today I Promise," "Rubric for Asparagus," and "My Life"

four times in one day
just because that
ending was fucking
sublime and i cried
the whole way thru
the bit where they
danced. i’m still
thinking about it
now that moment
when they

Oort Poetica

The way ice can become a verdant spring. Horace, you know the way we stare through lenses; how we bathe the sky in radio waves. Do you understand what it means to listen to a body

I LOVE THAT YOU LOVE ANIMALS AND I HOPE ONE DAY TO GET AS EXCITED AS YOU DO WHEN YOU SEE A PICTURE OF A PANDA ON THE COMPUTER

the other day when you came home you were
crying because one of your

BURLESQUE

~a contrapuntal poem

He was a friend                                                        he became my lover
he took my hand                                                      he

Polymers

Takes a blow-dryer
to the plastic flower.

Makes its petals
curve the way they’ll be needed

Left sucking long on the last bit
of bubble gum:
out of the lips, it drains
tarry

The First January Sun I Want to Share with You

At least a handful of sunshine,
the best ataractic; I
steady myself in the russet
downpour, attempting to trace
down this new feeling,
like a

Alchemy

Gathers me          with her silver gaze

     the moonlight reflects               milk

                                                                       and

you’re out of touch i’m out of time

“You know what to do with that big fat butt

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle”—Jason Derulo

        EVERYDAY WE

In the Brooklyn bar with skee-ball and dollar hot dogs
I tell a woman I'm a taxidermist for celebrities' pets.

Nirvana

I don’t think it was nirvana playing
I don’t know what it was
in the ocean sometimes
warm water is pulsing under the cold surface
I don’t know if I really mean it. I mean,
maybe it’s a

last month, every
robin I saw looked
like it wanted to fight

Your boyfriend was the first...

 (Netflix is the opiate of the people!)