Painting of a Vietnamese restaurant lunch menu.

Painting of a woman being pulled out of a river
by her hair and she is smiling and her hair is dry.

Painting of a war-torn meadow:

The summer you learned who was dealing what. You were applying to programs, your pointillism, neat in ink, when a wind disappeared your drawing.

the sky is gray and you will not stop talking
about balance
this focus has become your baby
for at least the past three days
last week it was tarot cards 
and a techno

All I wanted was the haze of a worn gown / of sleep after the scrape of that / honey-sipped night.

All summer the future had been coming for us like a thunderstorm at which turkeys look up and drown in the rain.

I hadn’t had any alcohol to drink in forty-two days.
I had told myself I wouldn’t drink for thirty but once you stop doing something it’s hard to start doing it again.

I agree to an extended death

I am yelling out the windows

of this speeding automobile

This has to stop— / you're a year dead. I shatter the mirror // with a glare, pace the hall carpet, / but others arrive by dawn, agitated // by thuribles, syllables scattered from / pulpits, daughters buttoned into pastel.

 fuck me here on this scabrous mountain while we all watch each other among sacred olives fuck away desire.

Watching the blood drain was the moment she knew/ that she didn’t have it figured out."

Tanja and I were competing to see who had moved the most as a child.
“I know of at least fourteen places we lived before I was eighteen,” I said.
Tanja started naming places she had lived. She kept naming her grandma’s house over and over, between every place.

If I too am a void into which/She finds the solace of vanishing.

yesterday I bragged
about having a friend

It's like how falling in love never leaves a good taste in your mouth. 

I can only remember smoking weed with Steve once.
It was either right before or right after I married my daughter’s father.

My sense of regret is the dog
you remember with immense fondness
but that you no longer know.

This is a 16-bit top-down adventure game, which, like many adventure games, is focused on a "hero." 

“God, dating Drake would be like dating a submissive,” my daughter said.

Construction drills
grind, teeth against the pavement.

Dear 52-Hertz Whale: Because you sing at a frequency no other whales can hear, scientists have nicknamed you "The World's Loneliest Whale." I'm sure it's unbearable out there, swimming through eternity, calling out...

You always complained of migraines. Now, I’m trying to decided if I’m sorry for not having sympathy for you.

Nicki Minaj just said, “all my independent women make some noise.”
I didn’t know if she meant me.

Caitlyn, let me take that hair / in my own hands and curl it down your back.

"The damage isn't that bad, not yet." 

The Dinosaur of Wyoming

I was never born a hermaphrodite. But I tell this story where I am born a hermaphrodite. And anyone listening after I get to the part when the gynecologist asks if