I’m hoarse and feverish. We sing in the streets, “Feelin’ good was good enough for me, hee hee,” but then the breakfast booth only has two seats.

I wear a velvet piece to the therapist’s office and she asks me to close my eyes. We agree to experience an illusion of me dancing...

I do not leave
the houses I’ve built, I carry the nails and raise

the walls around me

I can’t stop watching teenage boys eat shit at the skate park.
It gives me real pleasure.

You breathe and scream so deep, underwater it sounds like song. 

A wedding is coming
up, and it’s mine

Every time I walk to the library
I pass my old friend’s house
who doesn’t live there,
or anywhere anymore.

Once a year I decide
I don't love you. It's

today. Watch me
not make you breakfast.

The child is only
this flesh I grew

and you tore 
out of me.

Now it stirs in the

I've seen my friend Taylor sleeping
mouth open sometimes, one time with a boner

Whenever I've awoken him, he has
acknowledged my presence immediately

and put his hand in the

To love is to understand
the tsunami--

that it's just a thing the sea does
when it's been too long

missing the

but that's all about to change. My murder ballads, well, they prefer to terrify. I want to talk more about titular heroes. About what it means to kiss a goose. I mean, kill a goose. I want to do

chipped finger

nails the door shut         a swastika

earlobe   an appalachian woman

swollen & eating dirt       coercing

tiny white knots      you

Greek Yogurt

my daughter and I were watching TV
it was some show where a group of overweight women
lose a bunch of weight and wear bikinis in front
of their families and significant

where’s my dark booth damp panties mid-day fluff and relief

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

If I had any money I would leave the country. There aren't any people here and I know them all. I only want to express myself, but you can't say things like

That thing I scrape against every floor.
That thing, that thing keeps betraying me.

I knock on wooden bones for good luck,
but the splinters in knuckles act as omen.

I fold it with

everyone leaves the party

and I'm still at the party

I sleep on the floor some time later, leaving

a half-drunk Miller Lite within reach

there are mattresses

The first time i took an Adderall I fell in love and was in love

for four years.

father, son, and holy void

i no longer care
whose fault it was

which probably means
it was mine.

i could drive my car
into lake michigan

and wake up where
you

The past kept living inside me like a cheap Timex. “Where are you going?” the store clerk said. But I heard my father in my head, practically dragging me from bed to bon voyage me out of Newark when this terminal was merely stairs, no moving sidewalks...

For the thousandth time
I am describing our arms
and how they are
the perfect length

I built a Ferrari inside my white mouth
The shape of it was blue  and up came the sun
I said hey, Ferrari and with my white mouth   huffed it good, huffed it pretty
The throat of your pale moon heartscape contained me

You scare me kind of           your admission of an emo phase  

I didn't imagine you could grow into your harness, that it could embed in your skin, that you could plod one circle for so long that actually stopping would open up the ache in your body.  

And it is easy, so easy / to welcome them into the poem.